Mercedes looked in almost impenetrable shape after the first week of pre-season testing at Barcelona. The W08 set the pace, logged almost 100 more laps than any other car; star driver Lewis Hamilton called it the most detailed his Formula 1 team had ever built, said it looked "a thousand times better than everyone else's" - and that was just in basic specification.
The prospects for Mercedes' rivals seemed truly frightening. F1's dominant team was already tweaking some of its new aerodynamic parts, preparing an upgrade package for engine and chassis between tests, plotting a new campaign of world domination to begin at the first race in Australia.
Mercedes looked strong straight out of the box, with a suggestion of plenty more to come, perhaps even a 1m18s lap of Barcelona's Catalunya circuit.
That lap time ultimately came, but from Ferrari, not Mercedes.
Ferrari has been much-maligned after a troubled 2016 season, but it looked genuinely good in week one; a silent star - not saying much off the track, but doing some pretty encouraging talking on it.
Sebastian Vettel lapped well within three tenths of Valtteri Bottas, and didn't use the softest available tyres, his car looking strong, stable, driveable, consistent, and most importantly fast.
The Scuderia is a renowned testing show boater, so there was reluctance to get too excited. That's exactly what company president Sergio Marchionne did in 2016, when Ferrari matched Mercedes in pre-season testing but subsequently failed to win a race, let alone challenge for the world championship.
So these positive early signs were viewed with extreme caution.
The second week of pre-season testing is where the proper performance work happens. Fine tuning set-ups, unlocking potential, unleashing some of it, starting to build a real picture of where you might stack up against the rest.
Surely Mercedes would leave Ferrari trailing once it started to turn up the heat?
Of course, some genuine unknowns will always remain - relative fuel loads, engine maps, track conditions, tyre choices, aerodynamic configurations - until the first proper qualifying session takes place in Melbourne, but that doesn't mean the teams aren't trying. Testing has value. The results do matter to some degree.
Mercedes updated its car and brought its Melbourne-spec engine to Spain, but endured a tricky start to the week, with Hamilton's first morning compromised by some damage to the floor. By day two it was back on top of the pile, with Bottas lapping in 1m19.310s on the super-soft tyre, but that's as good as it got, or Mercedes wanted it to get.
For the final two days of this test, Ferrari set a scorching pace. Vettel sandbagged his way to a 1m19.024s best on Thursday, despite deliberately lifting off the throttle coming out of the final corner.
Vettel's best sector times put him in the 1m18.7s bracket on ultra-soft tyres. The best Hamilton did was a 1m19.352s, slower than Bottas managed on super-softs the day before. On the final day, Kimi Raikkonen did a 1m18s lap for real during his morning performance run, despite a small lock-up under braking for Turn 5. Raikkonen said at the end of the day that he could have gone even faster than that benchmark.
PURE PACE RANKING
1. Ferrari (Raikkonen) 1m18.634s (US)
2. Mercedes (Bottas) 1m19.310s (SS)
3. Williams (Massa) 1m19.420s (US)
4. Red Bull (Verstappen) 1m19.438s (SS)
5. Toro Rosso (Sainz) 1m19.837s (US)
6. Renault (Hulkenberg) 1m19.885s (US)
7. Force India (Perez) 1m20.116s (US)
8. Haas (Magnussen) 1m20.504s (US)
9. McLaren (Vandoorne) 1m21.348s (US)
10. Sauber (Ericsson) 1m21.670s (SS)
The best combination of sector times Bottas completed during his performance runs on Thursday, on a mixture of super-soft and soft tyre outings, lowers his theoretical best lap time to 1m19.040s.
Pirelli estimates the lap time difference between the super-soft and ultra-soft tyres on this track currently to be between 0.3s and 0.5s, so this suggests Mercedes was probably at least capable of something between 1m18.8s and 1m19.0s on the ultra-soft, a deficit to Ferrari of around 0.2-0.4s.
Along with the usual variables of unknown engine modes and fuel loads, Pirelli also stresses that the two softest compounds are not designed for this circuit. When the cars return for the Spanish Grand Prix in May, the soft compound is the softest tyre they will use.
On this tyre Ferrari set the pace quite comfortably, with Vettel managing a 1m19.341s best on Thursday, and lapping consistently in the low-1m19s. Max Verstappen managed 1m19.852s on the final day; Felipe Massa a 1m19.909s for Williams on Wednesday. Mercedes was only fourth fastest on this tyre - Hamilton pumping in a 1m19.915s effort at the very end of the final day.
Getting a read on where Mercedes really stands on the most relevant tyre for this track is not easy. In fact, getting a read on Mercedes' true pace in week two is near-impossible, as the entire test was affected by inconsistencies in performance created by what Mercedes called a "lack of robustness" in parts of the floor.
That's probably why Hamilton wasn't particularly content with his lot after his final pre-season day in the car, saying he had yet to find a set-up he was totally happy with.
"I haven't got it into a good window yet," says Hamilton, who earlier in the week called Ferrari the favourite given its strong pace in testing. "We've had up and down days, and there has generally never been a perfect day, but there is a lot of potential in the car."
The best we can do is estimate Mercedes' potential pace on the soft tyre. Bottas lapped in a 1m19.310s best on super-softs in in week two, so given Pirelli's estimate of a 0.3-0.5s difference between the soft and super-soft compounds, and the fact Bottas didn't put his best sectors together when at his quickest, Mercedes should probably have lapped somewhere between 1m19.3s and 1m19.5s with a perfect run on the softs - similar or slightly slower than Ferrari.
Mercedes also didn't complete a representative race run at the second test. Both drivers did some long runs during their final afternoons in the car, but did not attempt full race simulations in the way Ferrari and Red Bull did. Hamilton said this wasn't necessary for Mercedes, given it completed these simulations at the first test.
Vettel's Thursday afternoon race run was very impressive, his average pace nearly eight tenths of a second per lap up on Verstappen's (before the Renault MGU-K gave out in the Red Bull on Wednesday afternoon), and more than half a second quicker than Daniel Ricciardo managed while running at the same as Vettel.
The best we have to go on from Mercedes is Hamilton's race simulation from the first test, where Mercedes was running an older specification of engine, detuned to protect the turbo and compressor.
Hamilton's average pace during this run was just over three tenths of a second per lap down on Vettel's, which suggests Ferrari has a slight edge in race trim too. But that doesn't account for Mercedes running the updated engine specification at the second test, and potentially running more powerful engine modes as a result.
It's likely Mercedes could gain another two or three tenths over Ferrari, once the engine updates are accounted for, and the fact it couldn't get the updated chassis into the sweet spot owing to that troublesome floor.
"We have had so many different upgrades and maybe some of them haven't been perfect," says Bottas. "It's been affecting the car balance, and once you put new stuff into the car it's not like it's suddenly better.
"There's some things that we definitely need to unlock, and I'm confident that we will find most out of the package and it will be as good as planned. It just needs hard work. I'm sure we can get most out of all the stuff we're bringing to the car in Melbourne."
If - as some suspect - Mercedes also ran with more fuel than Ferrari during testing as well, that's likely to mean Mercedes actually holds an advantage of two or three tenths.
"I feel pretty happy inside the car, but still early days," says Vettel. "It doesn't really matter if you look at one single lap time - you need to look at more than that, and in that regard there's still a lot of work to do.
"We're probably still a little bit behind. If you look at the amount of laps Mercedes has done, if you look historically how slow they were going in the test, how much they were able to ramp it up for the races, I think it's clear that they're very fast if you look at their long-run pace, et cetera.
"I think they're the ones to beat."
It probably is optimistic to expect Ferrari to be right in the fight with Mercedes. The engine updates Mercedes brought to Barcelona solved any potential reliability concerns, and although customer squads Williams and Force India were using the older specification, some specific updates allowed them to power up their engines at the second test, where Williams showed a particularly strong turn of pace to lead the midfield pack.
There is great expectation that if Ferrari cannot challenge Mercedes this season, Red Bull can, but at present it is difficult to know where it stands in relation to the other big guns.
Red Bull lagged slightly behind Williams on pure pace at the second test, and Ricciardo suggested the team lost its way with the set-up for his race simulation on Thursday.
The squad has had to run its Renault engine at reduced power to protect the reliability of the fragile MGU-K in the new Energy Recovery Systems, but it already looks to be the third-fastest team in reality. And there is a feeling Red Bull will find a big chunk of extra performance when Renault introduces reliability fixes for Melbourne, and the team brings its first raft of updates to what remains a very basic-looking version of the RB13.
"Our true pace is closer but we're not quite on their level," says Ricciardo. "We certainly haven't showed Ferrari's pace yet, so you would say Ferrari is, at the moment, the closest challenger [to Mercedes]. We can get there, but we're not there yet."
Haas team principal Gunther Steiner reckons there is a 1-1.5s gap from top three teams back to the chasing pack - an impression supported by others in the paddock.
Williams's strong start to the second test suggests it is currently at the head of that queue. It's headline pace was slightly faster than Red Bull's, but Massa's average lap time during his race simulation on day one was more than six tenths of a second per lap down on the best Red Bull managed.
Unfortunately, that midfield pack will not include McLaren-Honda, which has suffered a complete disaster of a pre-season - struggling throughout both tests with a serious lack of power, and woeful reliability from the new Honda engine, which is currently producing less power than the one it developed to the end of last season.
Honda brought its Melbourne-specification engine to Barcelona for the second test, but this unit proved to be even worse than the one it used at the first test.
Unstable combustion in the ICE led to several failures throughout the week, as the Japanese manufacturer battled to control excess vibrations (which caused multiple electrical failures on the car) and detonation.
The McLaren-Honda could barely manage 10 laps in a row without breaking down, it was almost three seconds off the pace when it did run, and problems with the engine's mapping made the car difficult to drive when it wasn't stuck in the garage.
McLaren estimates it has completed only 30% of the work it planned to get through in pre-season, and expects to be fighting a losing battle to avoid Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne starting from the back row of the grid at the first race.
It appears Honda has over-promised and completely under-delivered with its revised 2017 power unit. Unlike Mercedes, for which it's likely the inverse is true - regardless of whether Ferrari's headline-grabbing lap times suggest otherwise.
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