James Vowles and Andrea Stella have voiced how unexpected it is to see Mercedes extracting so much efficiency during deployment from the HPP engine.

McLaren, Williams and Alpine only received the latest version of the engine last Thursday, while Mercedes already ran it for all six days of testing in Bahrain. The F1 rules state that engines need to be delivered identically after homolugation; and HPP only went through homolugation after the Bahrain test.

Stella said: "We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit, which, once I see the potential that HPP is extracting, looks like there's more that is available.Now, it's not obvious how you do that. For us, we are in a journey of knowledge.

"The works team and HPP will have worked together for a long time. So, they will have collaborated, talked about how to use the power unit. That's fair enough, but we'll definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP because our understanding is that there is some low hanging fruit that we should be able to cash in.