Formula 1 still has three more days of testing before the start of the 2026 season, but any fears teams would be under-prepared have already been long put to bed, as several proved themselves race-ready in this first Bahrain test.
Teams were doing simple long runs on day one but by day three many were doing what appeared to be proper race simulations - which were made trickier to take stock of given F1's timing system suffered persistent outages.
But around those outages enough of a picture did form, with race simulations by expected frontrunners Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari captured either fully or at least substantially.
Here's what we've gathered from teams' race-like running so far in Bahrain.
For the purposes of clarity, only flying laps are tallied here - meaning several of the 57 race laps that make up the Bahrain Grand Prix are discounted even for those who logged a 'full' race sim. Time spent in the pitlane here isn't really relevant, nor are individual laps lost to traffic or driver error (even though this can of course be informative of what the car is like to drive) or what-have-you.
Race runs
Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Start: Friday 5.37pm
Stint 1: Soft, 16 laps (1m40.128s avg)
Stint 2: Hard, 12 laps* (1m38.547s avg)
Stint 3: No data
Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari
Start: Friday 5.14pm
Stint 1: Soft, 17 laps (1m40.280s avg)
Stint 2: Hard, 17 laps (1m38.929s avg)
Stint 3: Medium, 6 laps* (1m37.461s avg)
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Start: Friday 4.57pm
Stint 1: Soft, 11 laps (1m40.947s avg)
Stint 2: Medium, 20 laps (1m39.604s avg)
Stint 3: Hard, 18 laps* (1m38.472s avg)
Sergio Perez, Cadillac
Start: Friday 4.02pm
Stint 1: Soft, 15 laps** (1m43.432s avg)
Stint 2: Medium, 15 laps (1m41.577s avg)
Stint 3: Hard, 21 laps (1m41.275s avg)
Esteban Ocon, Haas
Start: Friday 4.00pm
Stint 1: Soft, 8 laps (1m41.772s avg)
Stint 2: Medium, 12 laps (1m40.510s avg)
Stint 3: Hard, 16 laps (1m39.869s avg)
Alex Albon, Williams
Start: Friday 3.57pm
Stint 1: Hard, 17 laps (1m43.074s avg)
Stint 2: Hard, 17 laps (1m41.754s avg)
Stint 3: Medium, 18 laps (1m40.241s avg)
Franco Colapinto, Alpine
Start: Friday 3.41pm
Stint 1: Hard, 18 laps*** (1m42.285s avg)
Stint 2: Soft, 11 laps (1m40.640s avg)
Stint 3: Medium, 13 laps (1m39.565s avg)
George Russell, Mercedes
Start: Friday 11.47am
Stint 1: Soft, 16 laps (1m40.752s avg)
Stint 2: Medium, 17 laps (1m39.729s avg)
Stint 3: Hard, 19 laps (1m39.247s avg)
Isack Hadjar, Red Bull
Start: Thursday, 3.57pm
Stint 1: Medium, 15 laps (1m40.941s avg)
Stint 2: Medium, 13 laps (1m39.994s avg)
Stint 3: Soft, 12 laps* (1m38.628s avg)
Arvid Lindblad, Racing Bulls
Start: Thursday, 4.14pm
Stint 1: Hard, 13 laps (1m42.526s avg)
Stint 2: Medium, 14 laps (1m41.666s avg)
Stint 3: Soft, 5 laps (1m40.318s avg)
* denotes stints with laps lost to timing issues
** a very substantial break between first and second stint, but laptimes suggest continuity
*** car remained in pits for a handful of minutes
Test laptime analysis is precarious at the best of times, much less when a healthy chunk of the timing data is missing.
But there are things that can be deduced at this point in time.
The race run executed by Oscar Piastri around the same time as Lewis Hamilton was running in the Ferrari (and Kimi Antonelli soon joining them in the Mercedes) did indeed seem a considerable step behind those two, as corroborated by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella.
While the race runs executed by team-mates Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris on the day prior are currently almost wholly unavailable, it was suggested by Stella that those too fitted this pattern, and that Leclerc's was particularly competitive.
As for Hamilton versus his Mercedes replacement Antonelli, they are close in their respective first stint (on the same C3 compound), with Hamilton starting faster but his pace dipping enough for Antonelli to make up the difference at the end of the stint.
Antonelli is then quicker initially in the second stint, and notably so, but because of the timing crash we do not know what the pay-off is.
However, cutting off the available Friday race runs at the Antonelli mark of around 28 relevant laps in (but only those that only used two sets up to that point) does paint a good picture for Mercedes.
Antonelli 46m24.611s
Hamilton +7.484s
Piastri +18.038s
Russell +21.406s (morning)
Colapinto +1m02.548s
Albon +1m25.047s
Perez +1m26.208s
Ocon time excluded due to too-short first two stints
The Haas currently does appear best of the rest, but there's every sign right now of a considerable gap between the top teams and the midfield teams, albeit with much more of a midfield spread than we're used to.
Of the two teams whose race runs were conspicuously absent on Friday, the Red Bull had a handful of shorter stints generally in the 1m38s margin that not much can be gleaned from besides from the car being generally in the ballpark, and the Aston Martin only did a couple of true long runs, both just not particularly fast at all.
