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Friday running in Abu Dhabi suggests things are looking good for McLaren in its quest for the Formula 1 constructors' championship.
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri went 1-2 in the headline times with a handy 0.5-second advantage over Ferrari. Even more encouragingly for McLaren, its drivers were significantly faster in the long run simulations too.
Added to this, Charles Leclerc is taking a 10-place grid penalty for his Ferrari power unit change. Needing to score at least 21 more points in the race, it looks a tall order for the Scuderia.
In between the McLarens and Ferraris in the long runs were Mercedes and Red Bull, though the latter was struggling for single-lap pace amid Max Verstappen's complaints about a lack of front end grip, at one point describing his level of understeer as "ridiculous".
At Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton looked in strong form, generally quicker than team-mate George Russell in both qualifying and race stint simulations. In fact his long run was second only to the McLaren of Piastri.
Mercedes appears to be running a little less downforce than either Ferrari or, especially, McLaren, but even so the McLaren is fastest in all three sectors.
What it loses to the Mercedes at the end of the straights it is more than gaining by how fast it enters them. That can only be good news for McLaren's tyre degradation in the race too.
LONG RUN AVERAGES (all on mediums)
Piastri 1m29.245s (5 laps)
Hamilton 1m29.505s (7 laps)
Norris 1m29.568s (7 laps)
Perez 1m29.781s (8 laps)
Verstappen 1m29.878s (8 laps)
Leclerc 1m29.950s (7 laps)
Russell 1m29.980s (8 laps)
Sainz 1m30.121s (8 laps)
Norris, as usual, sounded a note of caution.
"It was a good day, yes; the car has been feeling good the whole day, we continued our pace from Qatar, so it feels strong," he said. "As always there are some things to improve on, in both low and high fuel - mostly on high fuel.
"It probably looks better than it is at the moment, I don’t think the others have turned up their engines yet, so it might look glorious now, but I think we’ll still have a tough fight tomorrow."
"It's nothing huge," he added, of what needs to be improved. "It's trying to find the balance between being quicker but saving the tyres, especially on the long runs, where can you push more and where do you need to save.
"Just trying to find the best compromise is the main thing."
But that sounds more in the realm of fine-tuning than the others.
Hamilton was enjoying his final Friday outing with Mercedes.
"Very surreal," he said, "and I've just tried to be really as present as I can be today and enjoying every moment.
"So from arriving to seeing the engineers and just really like taking moments and really capturing them as much as I can, then to getting ready and getting in the car, I've really enjoyed the day, I've really enjoyed driving the car today and working with the guys in the garage and the engineers.
"We've got some work to do, McLaren's still so fast, as is Ferrari, but we're in the mix."
Leclerc doesn't quite share Hamilton's assessment of the Ferrari pace, as he focuses on trying to make a recovery from the penalty.
"I'm not wishing problems on anybody else," he said. "We're just focusing on ourselves and try to do an amazing recovery on Sunday."
Red Bull was experimenting with wing levels, with Verstappen running a lower-downforce setting than Sergio Perez in FP2, the opposite of how they ran in FP1. It's all part of trying to home in on the ideal set-up for the still-tricky RB20.
As we've seen so many times this year, the Red Bull's sweet spot seems a narrow one, with Verstappen commenting he had "not a very good balance".
"Just no connected balance from entry to mid-corner and that makes it difficult to push and that's something that we have to work on overnight," he said
"I'm sure that we can do better. I'm not saying that we'll be like McLaren-level because they seem very quick so far this weekend. But at least if we can fight in that top six, I think that will be a good recovery because so far, it's been quite tricky."
