While the McLaren MCL35 is one of several 2020 contenders yet to show what it can really do, team boss, Andreas Seidl believes that the opening three days of pre-season testing were the Woking outfit's best start to a season for "many, many years".

Though both drivers were well down the timesheets, neither having tried the softest compounds, between them Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris completed the fourth most laps last week, 423, compared to Alfa Romeo's 424, Red Bull's 471 and Mercedes 494.

A far cry from the pre-season disasters of 2017 -when it completed 425 laps over the entire pre-season test - and 2018 (599), the Woking outfit got through the first three days with barely an issue.

As a result, the mood at Woking is what Larry David might well describe as "pretty, pretty, pretty good".

"To be honest, we're really, really, really happy with how it went so far, for various reasons," Seidl told Sky Sports. "First of all, if you look at the number of laps and the reliability we have shown so far, it is by far the best start for many, many years for McLaren going into a winter test.

"This is simply great reward and a sign for the entire team that all the hard work we have put in the last month in order to make this step is paying off," he continued, "so I’m very happy about that.

"In terms of program and test points, I'm also very happy that we could tick off a lot of boxes already of our job list," he added. "Without having these reliability topics, we simply could go through the run plan every day as planned."

Referring to his drivers lowly standing on the timesheets, he said: "We focus on ourselves, we don't focus on lap times and so on.

"We continuously bring parts to the car as well, with late deliveries back from the factory," he added.

"It's great to see the momentum that we are having," he enthused. "As you have seen, we tried a new front wing for example in the morning," he added to the update introduced on Friday. "And so far the car is doing what we expect from it. So it's great to see this correlation. I'm very happy."

Looking ahead to this week he said: "We have a program lined up continuously bringing parts to the track, also next week in order to get as much performance out of the car as possible before we head to Melbourne.

"In terms of the performance, so far I think it's still early days. We're happy with what we have seen so far. The car was, as I said before, performing as intended, so we don't have question marks on this."