With the sun setting over the Circuit de Catalunya on Sunday, the third and final F1 test was complete. So what did we learn from the final four days of testing before the cars are shipped off to Melbourne for the Australian GP?
This year, more than ever before it's hard to say. With teams able to vary fuel loads in tests, run underweight, even run parts that might not pass scrutineering there are enough variables to obscure (or flatter) a car's true pace.
Rain fell on the first two days, Thursday and Friday, so the real Melbourne-spec parts, the aero tweaks, will only have been trialled on the final two days. Before we go to the hard-to-interpret timesheets it's worth looking back at what happened on the final two days of Barcelona last year:
Day Three:
1.Perez, 2.Button, 3.Ricciardo, 4.Massa
Day Four: 1.Raikkonen, 2.Alonso, 3.Senna, 4.Hulkenberg
On the final day of Barcelona 2012 Sebastian Vettel was 11th and last, 1.5 seconds slower than the fastest time. This year, the added complication has been that the low temperatures and the rapid tyre degradation has made it very difficult to set cars up. So any changes that are dialled in - the consequences are rapidly dialled out by the degradation of the tyre.
Sebastian Vettel: "If you sum up the whole three tests, we were all limited to what the tyres could do. It was extremely difficult to read some set-up changes and find a good direction with the car because the tyres were simply not good enough."
Jenson Button seconded this. He believes his new McLaren MP4-28 is fast, but because of the poor read given by the tyres, the team are still figuring out which levers make it faster.
So what we have learnt is:
The new Pirellis have made it very difficult to judge where the teams are in the pecking order. The Ferrari team even believe there might be a shock result in Melbourne on the back of it. There was still worrying degradation even with the track at 24C in Barcelona, but Pirelli motorsport boss is confident that having run the same tyres in Brazil and Germany, this won't carry through to the bulk of the season.
Lewis prays for good things to happen. He revealed that he said a prayer for Adrian Sutil's return to F1. (And it worked). Some of Lewis's earlier correspondence with the big guy upstairs
Max Chilton got the perfect launch to his F1 career by amassing almost nine days of running (from 12) in the Marussia. With prospective team-mate Luiz Razia falling by the wayside he got extra days in the car before Jules Bianchi was signed up.
McLaren's dream start looks to have rapidly faded. After the four days of Jerez the team were looking strong, certainly in comparison to Mercedes, who had two disasters in the first two days, then banked a great many slow laps. Now, it's all turned round and the McLaren's long-run pace looked only marginally faster than Force India and Sauber in Barcelona with Hamilton fastest on Saturday and Rosberg fastest on Sunday.
Ferrari have done very little long-run testing. On the final day in Barcelona they were running constant speed tests on the soft tyre and spraying flo-viz paint on new aero parts. Alonso proved that they have great single lap pace (2nd fastest) but then again he was second fastest on Day 4 last year.
Last season Ferrari and Lotus were the two most reliable cars on the grid. In testing this season they have brought out a surprising number of red flags between them. On Saturday Felipe Massa lost a wheel, while the Achilles heel of the E21 seems to be its gearbox failing just when Kimi Raikkonen had recovered from his Saturday stomach bug.
As McLaren try to figure out their new pull-rod suspension system they are taking a long time between runs to adjust the car.
BBC technical analyst Gary Anderson, who has been watching the cars through the high-speed turns of Barcelona believes the Red Bull to have the most downforce and be the most planted of the 2013 cars. Also, that they have been running the highest level of fuels. Given that teams often test with the same amount of fuel from year to year, to give themselves a comparison, this would be consistent with the 2012 Barcelona times.
Mercedes are massively talking down their chances. Lewis Hamilton has declared that he wouldn't be a title contender in 2013 and that they were probably two to three seconds behind McLaren on race pace. If that were the case then Lewis's and Nico's 1:20 lap time on Saturday and Sunday should easily have been beaten by Mclaren. That didn't look very likely at Barcelona 2.
Alex Jennings
