At Spa, for example, teams need to trim the front and rear wings out to be competitive on the long straights of sectors one and three but are then left to struggle as best they can through the fast corners of the middle sector.

The point of compromise in wing settings that gives the best lap time will vary from car to car depending upon their aerodynamic characteristics.

The Toyota was devastatingly fast through that middle sector but slow on the straights - that was how it had to be set up to give its optimum lap time.

The Ferrari was the diametric opposite, very fast down the straights, hopelessly slow through the high-speed bends.

It is important to understand that this was not a case of the Toyota running too much wing or the Ferrari too little - but that the characteristics of the designs meant the best lap time demanded different approaches for each car.

What did this tell us? That even with more wing the Ferrari cannot give the extra downforce needed to overcome the lap-time penalty its slower straightline speed, caused by the consequent extra drag, would impose.

That the Toyota has plenty of downforce at high speed, responding so well that it can overcome the deficit in lap time from being slower on the straights.

How does the McLaren fit into this picture? Spa gave a great clue to this too.

It was slow on the straights and through the high-speed bends. Like the Ferrari, it lacks ultimate downforce capacity but unlike the Ferrari even the downforce it does produce comes at a big cost in drag.

The McLaren tends to be competitive only on slow corners and if there are enough of them to allow it to get on to the straights faster than the others, then it can be competitive. It also has a driver of genius who can make up some of the car's deficiencies.

Although Lewis Hamilton qualified second and finished third on the fast sweeps of Suzuka at the Japanese Grand Prix, his was actually only the sixth quickest car in the race. Essentially, he was where he was because he had out-performed the car in qualifying.

So we have a picture of the Toyota being intrinsically the fastest car of the three but maybe a little sensitive, the Ferrari and McLaren lagging some way behind in ultimate performance potential but in that order, but with Hamilton making a bigger difference than the other drivers.

Ferrari and McLaren are also probably better at extracting what performance there is than Toyota.