Far behind sovereign Red Bull, which has won all 10 grands prix so far, Mercedes holds second as F1 heads towards the halfway point the season.
But it has been a bumpy road to get there, with the status of second-fastest team changing hands on a week-to-week basis.
Surprisingly, Aston Martin started the season in that position, but it has been sliding back in recent weeks on high downforce tracks. Mercedes has been there or thereabouts but has suffered some off-kilter weekends too, even after its radical Monaco upgrades.
Then there's Ferrari, which has often struggled with consistency between tyre stints, never mind between races. The Scuderia appeared to have turned a corner in Austria, before enduring a disappointing weekend in Silverstone, where McLaren suddenly emerged as a contender thanks to a mid-season car overhaul.
The margins are so fine that adding any upgrades to the car can make an immediate, significant impact to the pecking order behind Red Bull. But according to Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur, F1 2023's confusing form table is not just about the development war as more time can be gained by nailing the set-up and tweaking the car to a particular circuit type.
"I'm not sure that it's development, it's also set-up during the weekend, because the development at one stage you will have a kind of an asymptote [a curve which gradually flattens out]," Vasseur replied when asked by Autosport if 2023 is all about which team develops the quickest.
"With upgrades you will make one or two tenths. With set-up and the preparation of the weekend, you can do more than this.
"You can't bring an upgrade on the car every single week. We'll have parts soon, but if I have a look at the [British Grand Prix] weekend, I think we could have had a much better usage of the car that we had."
Source: Autosport