Around an unusually cool but typically gusty Sakhir track, the first day of 2025 Formula 1 testing revealed a remarkably reliable bunch of cars from the 10 teams.
Inevitably however they are a long way from being optimised. So we can only make the most general of generalisations.
What we saw amid the very different programmes was a McLaren which took over half the day to be in a position to do a serious push lap, but when it did, Lando Norris was convincingly faster than anyone else.
"Some of our innovations are pretty bold," said McLaren CEO Zak Brown at a point when the McLaren had spent a lot of time in the garage and not gone particularly fast.
"So we just need to tick them off to ensure they're working."
Whatever was finally ticked off seemed to work well and early into the extended period, after a circuit power outage delayed things for an hour, Norris reset the bar. At the time he set his 1m30.430s, it was a lap 0.4 seconds clear of the field, reduced to 0.157s by the end of the day.
McLaren then switched focus to longer runs and as the track became steadily quicker, so first Max Verstappen and subsequently George Russell were able to get to within a few tenths.
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Neither Verstappen nor Liam Lawson looked at ease in the RB21, Lawson even suffering one of only two spins on the day (the other was Isack Hadjar).
The car looked snappy but Verstappen could coax it to competitive times, third in the end. Although his two long-ish runs were a couple of laps shorter than those of Norris, his average on the same C3 tyre was 0.4s quicker - with the usual provisos of unknown fuel loads and power maps.
"With Liam in the morning, we tried to make some set-up changes," said the team's technical director Pierre Wache, "to see how the car reacted to it and then in the afternoon when we changed to Max, we continued the programme with a different set-up change to see how we can understand the car for the next couple of days of testing."
Russell pronounced himself happy with the W16 but with provisos of his own.
"The car feels great," he said having set the second-fastest time by the end of the day.
"I felt confident in it and could push hard straight away. But we're not getting carried away. We know we've always been quick in the cold."
Track temperatures varied between just 18°C and 27°C. Kimi Antonelli had headed the morning times with a single low-fuel lap after an extensive build up of heavy fuel load work.
Charles Leclerc's fourth-fastest time for Ferrari at around 0.4s off was probably not representative, as it was set very early in the afternoon session. Ferrari also appeared to be running him much heavier than the others in the longer runs.
Lewis Hamilton had driven the car in the morning (when the track was much slower), with a lot of attention being given to measuring the flex of the new front wing. He appeared confident in the car and it showed a prodigious straightline performance. It was a promising beginning.
Williams looked very well prepared and was able to get some extensive running in. It was perhaps a very provisional best of the rest after the big four, just ahead of Alpine.
Aston Martin was not ready to do any significant number of consecutive laps but when it did run, it showed promising glimpses of form, particularly through the fast sweeps of the second sector. Both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll are reporting it to feel a whole lot better than last year's car around here.
The Racing Bull looked far from sorted and on around the same pace as the Sauber.
Haas meanwhile was the slowest on the numbers but both Ollie Bearman and Esteban Ocon racked up a huge number of laps. There is way more performance to come.
