Charles Leclerc set the fastest lap the next day in Barcelona, continuing a promising pre-season test for Ferrari.
In the morning, McLaren's impressive preseason test start continued on Thursday, with Daniel Ricciardo topping the lap table, while Red Bull's Sergio Pérez raised the first red flag in preseason tests.
On the first day of testing at the Circuit de Catalunya on Wednesday, McLaren's new MCL36 demonstrated speed and reliability. As Day One frontrunner Lando Norris put it, he "doesn't want to be P1, I'd rather be the last because expectations are too high right now".
Those expectations rose a notch on Thursday when Ricciardo led Carlos Sainz's Ferrari in the morning test.
Sainz was the fastest in 1:21.010 an hour after the test started, and then he improved to 1:20.546. It was probably the best before the lunch break, but Ricciardo made a lap of 1:20.355 with C3 Pirelli tyres in the final moments, 0.2 seconds ahead of Espanyol.
McLaren and Ferrari once again demonstrated more than just speed, Ricciardo and Sainz were also two of the hardest working drivers, with 65 and 71 laps respectively.
The morning test came to a brief stop halfway through the fourth hour, when Perez drove the RB18 to a stop at the exit of Turn 13, raising a red flag. Red Bull quickly found their car, sheathed it, and was carried onto a flatbed truck and back to the pit stop. Red Bull reported that this was a gearbox problem and the problem was quickly resolved.
During the four-hour test in the afternoon, Aston Martin's Sebastian Vettel took the lead on the track. A few minutes later, F1 rookie Zhou Guanyu made his 2022 debut. Haas Team's Ma Zeping suffered a fuel pump failure, which once again raised the red flag.
Sergio Perez's afternoon tests also went well and didn't improve until later.
With Leclerc topping the lap table with a time of 1:19.804 on C3 tyres, things have gone much more smoothly for Ferrari.
Entering the final hour, Gass used C4 tyres to run the second set of 1:19.918.
Most unusually, Lewis Hamilton ran 40 laps in the morning on the Mercedes W13 and found himself at the bottom of the line, 2 seconds behind his new teammate George Russell in lap P4.
One of the most striking things on Thursday was the drivers' struggles on the straights as the car jolted up and down. As one pundit said, it's not serious, but it's definitely visible. Another conundrum that teams had to solve was that the car was fast on the straights, but the slow corners were much slower than last year's, and it wasn't easy to find the right tuning. The cars weigh 43 kilograms more than last year, and the hardness of the suspension also affects them.