Although he stopped twice on track on Thursday, Nico Rosberg says the reliability of the W05 is better than Mercedes had expected.
The team covered the most miles of any outfit at the opening test in Jerez and continued to pile on the laps in Bahrain.
Behind the wheel of the W05 on the second day, Rosberg added a further 85 laps to the tally while his 1:36.965 put him fourth on the timesheets.
“It has been because we are better than expected with reliability,” he said.
“Our own expectation was that it would be even more difficult, so from that point of view we are pleased as everyone has done a good job to make this car relatively reliable to start off with – reliable in a way that we can do a lot laps and start to see little problems and also start to work on performance.