Mark Webber made hay as the sun finally shone over Jerez to lift Formula One out of the sodden gloom that has recently dominated testing.
After two days of wet weather at the southern Spain circuit, and following last week's four-day test at the same venue that was blighted by the poor conditions, the 11 teams on hand were all grateful to see blue skies.
However, that was after torrential rain overnight that caused localised flooding and initially led to a damp track this morning before the day warmed up and the circuit dried out.
But on arguably the most representative day of testing so far, it was Red Bull Racing's Webber who set the pace with the quickest lap of the 4.428km track over the seven days in total at the venue to date.
Australian Webber was one of six drivers to clock up over 100 laps, with the best of his 115 in total a one minute 19.299 seconds, just under 0.3secs better than the previous quickest posted by Lewis Hamilton in his McLaren on Saturday.
Webber finished the day 0.816secs clear of Fernando Alonso in his Ferrari and marginally over a second ahead of world champion Jenson Button for McLaren, the latter duo completing 132 and 101 laps respectively.
A content Webber said: ‘We're certainly showing some good form in terms of reliability, but we always need to work on performance; you never know what the other teams are doing.
‘But we're in a good position at the moment to build up to the first race.
‘It's close, but there's also quite a way to go, as other teams have no doubt planned developments for Bahrain.
‘We're doing the work we need to do in order to understand the car more.’
Button, meanwhile, declared himself ‘happy’ with his day's work, whilst his engineers have expressed their pleasure with the extent to which he has been able to establish himself within the team, and the depth and scope of his feedback.
Behind the leading trio, Williams' Nico Hulkenberg was a further second off the pace in fourth place, with the young German rookie amassing a high of 138 laps and over 600 kilometres in the process.
Seven-times champion Michael Schumacher was just five thousandths of a second behind his compatriot in fifth for Mercedes, followed by Renault's Robert Kubica and Adrian Sutil for Force India.
A fuel system problem hindered Kamui Kobayashi's day for Sauber, the Japanese managing just 28 laps after spending five hours in the garage as his team corrected the issue.
Kobayashi was eighth quickest, followed by Jaime Alguersuari in his Toro Rosso, whilst the two new boys in Lotus Racing and Virgin Racing expectedly brought up the rear.
Virgin's Lucas di Grassi just edged out Lotus' Heikki Kovalainen by 0.017secs, with the duo both a fairly respectable four seconds down on Webber at this early stage in their development.
However, both teams had issues, with Kovalainen causing one of the six red flags of the day with a clutch sensor failure that led to him stopping on track, whilst his Lotus later suffered a cracked exhaust.
Di Grassi caused two of the other red flags due to issues with his car that resulted in him completing just 34 laps compared to the 68 for Kovalainen.
