The numbers from Formula 1 pre-season testing and the 2025 Australian Grand Prix weekend so far have undermined the best efforts of McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri to downplay their supremacy.
A front-row lockout with an advantage of almost four tenths over the next-fastest car, Max Verstappen's Red Bull, shored up a favourite tag that has become more robust with every day of on-track running so far.
So does the first competitive day of F1 2025 prove that this will be McLaren's year, or is the picture muddier?
Inevitably, it's a little more complicated even though there's no doubt the McLaren MCL39 is, right now, the car of choice in F1. To conclude how large, and persistent, its advantage might be requires a larger sample set of data.
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Earlier in the weekend, Norris dismissed as "short-sighted" those who assumed testing showed a healthy advantage for his team. Even after dominating qualifying, both drivers stressed how difficult it is to get the best out of a car which Piastri said is "quick, but it bites".
There's no question the McLaren is fast and, based on the evidence to date, likely has the highest performance ceiling of all the cars. The question is whether it might be a little too on-edge at times, a concern first raised in Bahrain when Norris referenced rear-end instability.
Yet on Saturday in Melbourne, the McLaren was well-behaved. Both Verstappen and Charles Leclerc's Ferrari could match it for a substantial proportion of the lap on their final qualifying attempts, only for the gap to grow dramatically from Turn 11 onwards.
That indicates a McLaren that avoided overworking its tyres earlier in the lap, or at least had done so far less than the rest. That's a very useful characteristic, particularly on tracks where Pirelli allocates tyres towards the softer end of its compound range where the key to a quick qualifying lap is preserving the tyres to avoid shipping time in the final corners.
The first Q3 runs supported the drivers' contention that the car could be difficult, with Norris having his time scrubbed for exceeding track limits at Turn 4 and Piastri shipping time at Turn 13 thanks to spiking the tyre temperatures with a moment two corners earlier.
As Norris himself pointed out on Thursday, teams always want to downplay their pace and cast themselves as underdogs, but among the performative element of accentuating the negative, doubts remain about whether the McLaren might, on another day at another track, face a sterner challenge.
"As much as we want to dominate and have a result like we've just had, it really was not necessarily our expectation to have a bit of a gap to the rest of the cars," said Norris.
"But it's been difficult. One of our things has been how difficult it's been in our car just to execute those qualifying laps and to put things together. That's been something I've struggled with this weekend.
"To have the kind of pace we had today was not unexpected, but we just weren't going in thinking we're going to have two tenths over everyone, or one-and-a-half-tenths. We know we have a good car."
When The Race asked McLaren team principal Andrea Stella about the suggestions of the car being peaky or tricky to drive on the limit, he made clear that many of those concerns arose from the more challenging conditions of the Bahrain test.
"When we were in Bahrain we heard not only from our drivers, but from others, that it was difficult to put laps together, especially on day three," says Stella. "Even from one lap to the other in the same corner, you find a different level of grip.
"But today in Australia, the conditions were very different - one of the cases in which we have measured the least amount of wind. So looking at the cars today in these conditions can be a bit misleading, because the car did not experience much wind.
"Formula 1 cars are fundamentally aerodynamic machines, and as soon as you put the wind, their performance may vary considerably. So I think our car today behaved well, and it was predictable. But it's the same car as Bahrain where it was unpredictable, and very much this is dependent on the environmental conditions."
That's a good reason to believe that McLaren's advantage was perhaps towards the upper end of its potential.
Add that to the track configuration and the fact that the McLaren looks after its tyres well across a qualifying lap, likely partly down to its visibly better ride than its rivals combined with its downforce levels, and it's obvious there will be days when there are fewer factors in its favour.
That said, these are all strengths that, to a greater or lesser extent, should be of value everywhere.
The question is whether if there is more wind, or at tracks where any potential yaw sensitivity is exposed, then the trickiness of the car might make it more difficult to extract the laptime from?
Stella calls the car "innovative" and efforts have been made to push the limits of what can be achieved under these regulations, so there's still much to be learned.
Until any significant upgrades change the picture, whether McLaren is quick enough to reel off a run of early-season victories will depend on whether the car will, to use Piastri's phrasing, bite hard enough to put it on the back foot and allow others to challenge.
In the short-term, there is a potentially confounding factor for Sunday's race in the form of the weather. Rain is forecast, which based on last year's form would favour Verstappen given he is, as Stella says, "mega" in such conditions and McLaren struggled in the wet at Interlagos last year.
Stella describes the wet performance as an unknown, but he adds that McLaren "learned things from Brazil" - and that it's clear the car has a good level of downforce, which is always beneficial in such conditions. A wet race would be a useful test case.
The McLaren MCL39 is unquestionably the best car at this stage of the season, but it would be premature to predict relentless dominance will follow and foolish to assume its 0.385-second qualifying advantage will be replicated at every circuit. There's every chance the advantage in Melbourne in qualifying trim could be larger than it would be at other tracks.
But what we have seen so far suggests it's the best car, even though there will be limitations that are lying in wait to be exposed in trickier conditions. If Melbourne qualifying was close to an ideal set of circumstances, we perhaps have the upper end of the scale for McLaren's potential calibrated. What we have yet to discover is where it could stand on a more difficult weekend.
What's beyond doubt is that it's a car that should have the speed to challenge for pole position and victories on a consistent basis - even though there will inevitably be days when it is pushed harder than it was here.
