Mercedes technical boss, James Allison admits to being blown away by the reliability shown by the teams and manufacturers in Spain.

It would appear that the fear of a repeat of 2014 that drove the teams to stump up the cash - wonder if that will affect their budgets - for last week's media lock-out proved wide of the mark, with those teams and manufacturers that turned up showing remarkable reliability.

Over the course of the five days the teams completed over three-thousand laps, with no significant failures.

"I think the biggest thing that surprised us, and I'm guessing it's true also for our competitors, has been the really quite astonishing level of reliability that we've seen up and down the grid," says Allison.

"With everything new as it is, I think it would have been reasonable to expect this first shakedown test to have been just a symphony of red flags and smoking vehicles, but that really hasn't happened," he adds.

"In fact, for the most part, the reliability of these cars has been absolutely comparable, in some cases, better than last year's winter testing, with things that were far more mature, and which were very well understood.

"So that has definitely been a surprise to us, a welcome surprise, and I hope something that means that we can go into the new season, just concentrating on the racing, rather than trying to keep everything held together with baling wire and sticking tape."

Though no-one is really paying attention to the times - that will come at the second Bahrain test - those five days did at least allow the likes of Mercedes to check out the opposition.

"Intensely, of course," admits Allison. "Everybody spends the whole of the year or so it takes to design and build these cars, working in a vacuum, absolutely focused on what you're doing, intensely caring about putting as much performance as you possibly can into those cars.

"But knowing that up and down the land and abroad as well, there are other groups doing exactly the same, wrestling with the same challenge, and thinking about it probably differently to the way we are. And so when we do all emerge into the light, we just fall upon their designs to try to see what they may have found that we may have missed.

"And we take as many photos as we can, and then if we see something that is tricky to understand, we will put people on it until they do. If we see something that we think, 'Oh, crikey, we should have thought of that', then we'll start working on that as fast as we can.

"Overall, we are completely shameless plagiarists, and the reason we're shameless is that we know all of our competitors are exactly the same. Part of the sport is doing what you can with the skills you have on your own. And then when you all come together, then working out what other people have done and trying to learn from them as well."