Still focussed on its 100-race plan, Alpine targets an ambitious development programme beginning this weekend in Bahrain.

When Alpine emerged from the ashes of Renault, CEO Laurent Rossi announced an ambitious 100-race plan, the French team aiming to be competing for podiums and wins after 100 races.

This, of course, was in no way connected with the 5-year target set by Renault when it bought the Enstone-based Lotus outfit in 2016.

Anyway... 44 races into the 100-race plan, having leapfrogged McLaren for fourth, Alpine is targeting an ambitious development programme for the coming season as it seeks to close on the 'big three'.

In all honesty, the French team hardly set the test alight, completing the second fewest number of laps and never troubling the likes of Haas, AlphaTauri or Aston Martin on the timing sheets, far less Mercedes and Ferrari.

Nonetheless, as early as this weekend the team will begin its upgrade programme, which will continue throughout the season.

"There'll be some visual differences at the first race," said technical director, Matt Harman. "We've got quite a nice upgrade going on, and hopefully that'll help with our with our quest at getting closer to that third position, if not being in that position.

"Moving forward, with what we learned this week to not only improve the car for the first race itself, but also with development we know we want to be aggressive, as we were last year, if not more so."

In contrast to its rivals, last season saw Alpine regularly introducing small upgrades at each race as opposed to whole packages at certain events. Judging by the way it overhauled McLaren it appeared to work.

"It may not be at every race," admitted Harman, "because I think as the cars are evolving they're becoming more integrated and therefore the packages that you need to bring need to be a little bit more widespread.

"But fundamentally, there will be an attempt to try and develop something at every race, even if it's not bodywork or things that you see visually, but things that you maybe can't see that will give us lap time. That's our intent.

"As we said before, we were quite proud of that last year and we've got the same resources, we've got the same finances, if not slightly better so it's just down to us to get through that work, really."

Asked about the test, it came as no surprise that he resorted to a familiar pre-season cliche.

"We have a level of confidence," he said, "because we're clearly not running the car at its full potential.

"I don't like to labour on that too much," he continued, "because I have no idea where the others are running, to be quite honest. We do our analysis.

"We all know we are looking at each other, and where we are," he added. "There's a massive level of uncertainty in that. But from our point of view things are responding as we expected, our aerodynamics are working as we expected.

"We've tried some quite interesting different developments this week, and they've proved to be quite positive. So we're looking forward to the first race."