McLaren technical director James Key has expressed his pleasure at how the team's testing programme has gone, as the team prepares to defend its third place in the constructor's championship.

The Woking-based outfit who have recently reunited with Mercedes Benz for the first time in seven years had showcased their speed early on in the test when Daniel Ricciardo went fastest in day 2's morning session.

However, the team also had one of the lowest laps counts out of all the teams, which Key explained to selected media outlets that included Motorlat was because they wanted to complete all of their goals they set over the winter and swapping the drivers in between sessions.

"There's no negative reasons behind the low lap count we’ve got one because of the fact we swap the drivers everyday which always has an effect on time but also to try and split our time between data gathering, which can be time-consuming at times and just sticking lots of miles on the car which you would like to do a lot of immediately but if you do that you don’t necessarily get all those little tests done, so it was planned, of course, we would like to maximise mileage, but I think we’ve ticked a lot of boxes during this programme".

Team principal Andreas Seidl previewed the fight for third place in the constructor's where they will face stiff competition from Aston Martin and Alpine and Ferrari, who have recently upgraded their engine over the winter.

"I think we will see a close fight again between us; Aston Martin, Alpine, Ferrari for sure will be in the fight, Alpha Tauri looks strong, and with everything we could see so far, we still need to wait till the first weekend to find out who's the quickest as everything's close together again."

On the final day of testing, Lando Norris went fifth fastest with fifty-two laps completed whilst Ricciardo was ninth covering the same amount of laps as his British stablemate.