Lando Norris perhaps provided a clue after Bahrain Grand Prix FP2 yesterday when, despite the McLarens showing a big advantage over the rest of the Formula 1 field, he was playing it down, suggesting the margin over George Russell's Mercedes might be more to do with respective power unit modes or fuel loads.
Sure, it was probably partly Lando's half-empty way of looking at things, but there were already signs that he might have been scratching a little more than team-mate Oscar Piastri.
Piastri has duly put himself on pole, by a relatively comfortable margin over Russell but a whole 0.426 seconds and five places ahead of team-mate and title rival Norris.
Most of that was lost at Turn 1 as the McLaren understeered into the corner then pivoted into oversteer as he got on the power. But for that, Norris would likely have been on the front row, but not a threat to Piastri and probably only marginally ahead of Russell.
There are a few important factors to this, some technical, others surely psychological.
As the track temperature drops into the dusk, the McLaren's big advantage around here over the Mercedes reduces significantly. Just as we've already seen this year and last, the Mercedes is more competitive the cooler the track. It's also looking like a more robustly, consistently competitive car than the peaky Ferrari and Red Bull. The minor grid penalties for both Mercedes don't detract from that.
The McLaren keeps its rear tyre temperatures in check by the end of the lap better than any other car and that's likely going to be super-valuable here tomorrow. But on the stiffer construction of the 2025 Pirellis, it's not as good as the Mercedes at quickly generating front tyre temperatures by the start of the qualifying lap. Especially now that Russell has perfected the hard out-lap technique allowing him to fully exploit that trait.
They are the technicalities. Over the Sakhir lap, the McLaren is comfortably faster, albeit not by as much as was apparent yesterday. But the Mercedes is close enough that any error that Piastri's speed has been able to apply to Norris has made him vulnerable.
The McLaren is a demanding drive, more so than last year's it seems. It's easy to overload the front but if you can carry good momentum into the turn, and transition it progressively, the rear just sits down and grips.
Piastri's pole lap was a case study in incredibly smooth steering inputs and silky momentum. He does that despite braking late and not applying any steering/brake overlap. It's a straightforward style and his calm confidence allows him to commit to that judgement. That calmness is helping him deliver. Off the back of that crucial error in Suzuka qualifying, he's arrived in Bahrain and simply reset.
Norris isn't quite as tuned in here, has not been as confident. McLaren arrived here with some control tweaks for brakes and throttle designed to help both drivers but which has been initiated by Norris' complaints, as he's more sensitive to overworking the front axle.
He's as quick as Piastri here when he hooks it together (like in Q1), but not as consistent. Attacking his final Q3 lap having been a little behind his team-mate, he just took a little too much speed into Turn 1 for front tyres not quite up to full temperature.
As he wrestled with the understeer and tried to get on the gas early, so the car pivoted around the outer front and power-slid out of the exit. Fronts under-temperature and now rears over-temperature, that was his quarter-second of time loss right there. On a cooling, improving track, it meant that Russell, Charles Leclerc, Kimi Antonelli and Pierre Gasly were all able to shade him.
He was destroyed afterwards, as was apparent in his post-race interviews where he was super-hard on himself.
Piastri just calmly acknowledged the achievement and noted that actually he lost a bit of time in Turns 1 and 13. But it was good enough; career pole number two.
The Ferrari team-mate gap
But much as Norris felt despondent about his performance relative to his team-mate here, it was a much closer match than was Lewis Hamilton to Leclerc.
The Ferrari in its current state is way more demanding than a McLaren, with no consistency in balance between one corner and the next, but Leclerc has been able to take out his brain and ride the bronco, hoping that new tyre grip would cover up the worst of it.
"I've gone in quite an extreme direction in the last few weeks in terms of set-up," he said after getting to with 0.15s of Russell's Mercedes, "and it makes it very, very tricky to drive. But it allows me to extract a bit more out of the car as it is at the moment.
"But on used tyres it's all over the place and very difficult to put it together. So when I put on the new tyres I just had to trust that everything would come back."
Hamilton was 0.6s behind and six places back in the times, behind Carlos Sainz's Williams.
Lewis was just not able to muster the same faith as Leclerc in the rear of the car. He couldn't carry anything like the same confidence through the fast, demanding interconnected Turns 5-6-7 sequence where he simply bleeds lap time. He drops almost 0.3s to Leclerc through that section alone, having entered Turn 5 pretty much on par for the lap up to that point. There's further significant loss through Turns 11 and 13.
"Sorry, really sorry," he radioed in. "Just poor performance," he summarised afterwards. "Just not doing the job… it happens every Saturday." As with Norris, it poses the question of which comes first: the underperformance or the psychological hurt?
Confidence wasn't the problem for Antonelli; in fact, he probably had a little too much of it as he came into Q3 excited at how apparently close to the pace he was. He pushed just a little too hard on his first Q3 lap, ran outside of track limits and so without a time on the board was obliged to adopt a more cautious approach to his final lap, one which netted him fourth place, a couple of tenths down on Russell, before the penalties.
Alpine's strides
"Have you seen how quick that Alpine is in Turns 6 and 11?" said a shocked Sainz. "It's as quick as a McLaren through those corners. They say they are 0.3s down on engine. With a Mercedes engine it would be on the front row!"
Alpine had indeed made great strides, something which had been suggested by its speed in Suzuka's Esses last week. Gasly was revelling in its planted rear and good front end to go fifth quickest.
That was over two-tenths faster than Max Verstappen could muster in the Red Bull. The Suzuka pole car was never a factor here, far too demanding of the rear tyres at the end of the lap on Friday, the cure for which simply gave it excessive understeer throughout the lap today. It was just not getting the front tyre to bite and this was giving him all sorts of problems under braking too. Yuki Tsunoda was again significantly adrift but at least made it into Q3.
Sainz put the Williams somewhere in between the Red Bulls, with team-mate Alex Albon a Q1 casualty after getting mixed up in traffic on his prep lap and locking up at Turn 4 - though he should have been in Q2 anyway but for an FIA lap deletion error involving Nico Hulkenberg's Sauber.
From a championship perspective, Piastri has just inflicted heavy damage upon his most obvious rival. All he needs to do now is calmly convert it.
