The race is on. And just like that, Formula One pre-season testing is done and dusted

with the completion of the third and final day in Bahrain, and Red Bull's Max Verstappen set the pace,

with the best Mercedes lap a second down. We know that's not representative, but what's the real story? I'm Ed Sturon, joining me to answer that question, a Gary Anderson and Mark Hughes. Well, today we saw a flurry of quick lap times towards the end of the afternoon. Bastapin did the best lap of 1 minute 28.960 on the C4 Pirelli's. Alphateri driver Yuki Sonoda was second fastest on

the C5 so that's the softest available tyre, just 93,000th of a second slower. Collis Sight's third

for Ferrari, 0.651 seconds down. Kimi Reichen and fourth, eight tenths down and then Lewis Hamilton

5th, 1.065 seconds down.

But, of course, headline times can't be trusted.

And as ever, Mark Hughes has been following every single lap.

So what's the real story as you see it?

Yeah, it literally was every single lap.

I've put every single lap of the last three days into an Excel sheet.

So, yeah, sort of seeing treble at the minute.

Yeah, it's quite interesting when you sort of break it all down.

And definitely there was a big step up today from the two Honda-powered teams.

So speculate that, speculate that,

you know,

maybe they've been,

um,

allowed to run them a bit more aggressively today because they established the reliability for the previous two days.

I don't know,

but some,

some of it was that,

...