Mark Hughes' Abu Dhabi GP form guide

"Maybe what we've been seeing in the past few races are tracks to which the Red Bull is especially suited," said McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh earlier in the weekend.

Yes, maybe...

But beneath any cynicism for such a notion, there is cause for possible optimism for McLaren, in that Lewis Hamilton's customary brilliance in the sharp direction changes between the walls of Yas Marina's final sector in Friday practice did appear to be making up a chunk of time over everyone else - Red Bulls included. Their best low-fuel laps of Friday resulted in Sebastian Vettel just a couple of tenths of a second ahead of Hamilton.

As ever, it's difficult to read definitively, given the unknown fuel-load comparison and the different pattern of the long runs between the two teams.

Of the four cars from McLaren and Red Bull, Jenson Button's completed a genuinely long run - a 15-lap stint that looked very respectable and which underlined that, just as in India last weekend, the tyre compounds chosen (medium and soft) are on the conservative side, with very little performance degradation apparent.

Hamilton's heavy-fuel runs were interrupted, and he suffered a repeat of his India gear-paddle problem. At Red Bull Mark Webber suffered a repeat of his India KERS problem, while Vettel didn't do a comparably long run to Button's.

So we have a situation where Button's was the best long run, but without an equivalent Red Bull run to give it perspective.

Furthermore, that long run was very similar to that of Ferrari's Felipe Massa. As usual the Ferrari looks a pretty strong racecar, but a little deficient even to McLaren in qualifying.

Alonso tried Ferrari's new front wing during the afternoon © XPB

The revised front wing, new turning vanes beneath the nose and fresh rear wing all appeared on the F2012 here.

Partway through the Friday afternoon session Fernando Alonso finally moved onto the new wing, which had been extensively tested throughout the morning by Massa.

Into the afternoon Massa reverted back to the old wing for cross-referencing but had the diffuser introduced on Alonso's car in India. "It's looking promising," said technical director Pat Fry.

The Lotus appeared to take a small step in competitiveness, with low-fuel lap times comparable to the Ferraris for both Romain Grosjean and Kimi Raikkonen. It's long-run pace did not look quite as strong.

There are a few aero tweaks on this car and also some exhaust modifications that allow the Coanda system not to lose quite as much horsepower as before. There was then a significant gap in low-fuel pace to Williams, Mercedes and Sauber.

Red Bull created a great deal of interest from other teams when the tea-tray leading edge of the floor of Webber's car began scraping the ground partway through his run.

This follows the similar incident with Vettel's car during the race in India, which was put down to a broken aluminium stay getting trapped between it and the track. That didn't appear to be the case here.

There's not a great deal of hard data but, at a track where only Vettel and Hamilton have ever started from the front row, it could well happen like that again.