Who is most ready for Melbourne?

Formula 1 teams have been spoiled in recent years by stable rules allowing them to hit the ground running in pre-season testing before packing the cars up for the first race.

Race simulations, set-up changes, tyre work, pitstop practice - you name it and they could get through it. During pre-season testing last year, the 11 teams completed 49,942km during all 12 days of testing, at an average of 4161km per day.

This year, in 10 days they've averaged 2337km per day.

So what's really going on? Who's been able to carry out a programme of genuine worth in preparation for the new season?

Mercedes, both as a team and an engine supplier, has been leading the way from the off this pre-season. Nico Rosberg was the only driver to complete a race run during the first four days in Spain, where most of the teams - including some with the German engine - were doing little more than troubleshooting.

The German has carried out the majority of the race simulation work for Mercedes, with Lewis Hamilton's days in the car - both at Jerez and Sakhir - not running quite so smoothly.

Rosberg, who surely has the most 'race' mileage of any driver so far this year, has highlighted the challenges of managing the new 100kg fuel limit.

Rosberg says even Mercedes is on the limit for Oz preparations © XPB

He admitted after a race simulation last week that fuel management had been "difficult", having gently slowed his pace over the second half of the run to make the full distance.

While Bahrain is one of the toughest tracks for fuel consumption, Rosberg believes this is also going to be one of the "biggest challenges" for the Australian GP. In terms of understanding how to handle that, he is in pole position.

In the early part of the Bahrain test double-header, McLaren joined Mercedes in achieving decent enough reliability to get down to some proper work. Every time you looked out on the circuit, there was a high chance of seeing two silver cars circulating on yet another set of long runs.

Even when the Woking-based team has not focused on long stints, it's been advanced enough with its programme to work on specific areas with rookie Kevin Magnussen.

He topped the second day of the first Bahrain test after spending time working through new sets of all of the dry tyre compounds. McLaren felt able to dedicate a section of its programme to back-to-back running on each so he could learn to feel the differences between them.

Were the Dane trying to get through a 'rookie programme' at some other teams in the pitlane, he would be under-prepared in comparison to the position he now finds himself in.

But while McLaren is satisfied with the mileage it's logged, as pre-season reaches its climax there are concerns that the MP4-29 won't have the pace to live with 2014's fastest.

The other Mercedes customer teams had slightly more disrupted running during the first Bahrain test, but Williams in particular made short work of playing catch-up.

After a wiring loom problem limited Felipe Massa to just five laps on the first day, Williams bounced back to clock 116 laps with Valtteri Bottas 24 hours later.

Williams has run race simulations and handed a day to test driver Nasr © XPB

Since then, the team has run through race simulations, given a day to its new test driver Felipe Nasr, and even devoted a significant chunk of a day to live pitstop practice.

That's a clear sign that it was well-advanced with other areas of its test programme that would demand more than out- and in-laps from its drivers.

Force India has been the Mercedes team with the most minor issues tripping it up. But it did manage a first attempt at a race run on Thursday, leading Sergio Perez to refer to it as his first "proper day" of testing this year.

That theme continued into day two and is likely to be the case for Nico Hulkenberg for the rest of the week. But compared to the teams with the same engine advantage, Force India is working through jobs that its fellow Mercedes runners were ticking off last week.

The term 'race simulation' tends to mean different things to different teams, and that can be dictated by how far through a pre-season workload people are.

"There are several ways of doing it," explains Williams's chief test and support engineer Rod Nelson.

"You can do what we call a soft race sim - it's 57 laps here, so you split it into three 19-lap runs and push the car back into the garage, check it over and push it out again [between each stint].

"Everyone usually does that the first time. The next time you are looking more at the fuel, what you do on the formation lap and all that kind of stuff. So you build up your experience by getting closer and closer to a proper race."

It's for those reasons that Mercedes, McLaren and Williams stand out.

All three had multiple race runs under their belts before this final test. So rather than simply completing the distance of a grand prix - Nelson's 'soft' race sim - they have been able to work towards a proper simulation.

They've also been able to switch between short and long runs, sometimes spending half a day working on set-up changes and half a day running through a race programme.

Ferrari has racked up decent mileage, but is not yet satisfied © XPB

This is where Ferrari comes in. It has a decent amount of mileage under its belt, particularly with Fernando Alonso, but it's not yet satisfied with its race simulation programme.

Delays with Kimi Raikkonen last week proved costly, shunting some of the planned early race-spec work into the final test.

Raikkonen's days have been more troubled than Alonso's in general, but even the race work carried out by the Spaniard has been patchy.

The final stint of Alonso's race run caught the eye on Friday, as he regularly churned out laptimes that were a match for anything we've seen from Mercedes in the comparable phase of a simulation, with the F14 T averaging 1m40s over the 12 laps.

During last week's race run, where he had to manage his fuel, Rosberg's final stint of the same distance averaged 1m41.1s. But the rest of his run was significantly faster (potentially almost one second per lap on average, even taking track conditions into account) than the Ferrari managed in its earlier stints.

Alonso's late flurry suggests there is some raw pace in the car, although he complained of a troubled run where he had been managing issues from the cockpit. And he made a point of calling on Ferrari to focus on pace for the rest of this test.

Raikkonen has made it clear that he is targeting a race simulation of some sort on his final day of running on Saturday. But even if he does, Ferrari is set to go into the Australian GP with much less of an understanding than the leading Mercedes teams in terms of what to expect when the lights go out at Albert Park.

Still, every lap Ferrari gets through takes it closer to painting the picture of a 2014-spec grand prix. This is knowledge that some of its rivals - particularly those with Renault powerplants - can only dream of.

Day two produced light at the end of the tunnel for Red Bull © XPB

This brings us to Red Bull, which finally saw some light at the end of the tunnel today.

However, when several of your rivals are clocking up multiple race runs and you are getting excited about completing a run of 20 timed laps for the first time in testing, you know there's still a lot of work to do.

One team member described Red Bull's 2014 test programme prior to today as "a broken record".

Due to the packaging problems that the team has been blighted with, the cycle was tiresomely simple: do a few laps, stick to a cautious pace, then bring the car in, take the rear bodywork off and get as many fans blowing cool air onto the parts that are consistently overheating.

Red Bull has tried all sorts of quick fixes, and behind the screens at the front of its garage the sound of power tools being put to work has been a regular feature of the pre-season.

"Last week we were doing stuff that we would have liked to have done at Jerez, and now we're trying to catch up on stuff from last week," said Daniel Ricciardo on Thursday.

"I think it's important for us this week to try to get some longer runs in. I think we'd be pleased if we get that done."

Friday's running, which included the RB10 showing a glimpse of its potential speed for the first time, will have done a lot to boost morale in the world champion team as it readies the car for Sebastian Vettel to drive for the next two days.

Given how far advanced its rivals are, even if Red Bull leaves Bahrain on Sunday with a reasonably quick car that can finally complete a decent amount of laps, it's still likely to be heading into the Australian GP 'blind' in terms of how the first race of 2014 is going to play out.