Lewis Hamilton has been rewarding the faith shown in him by McLaren Mercedes with performances in preseason testing that underline the 22-year-old Briton’s pedigree as a potential star in Formula One.

In the run-up to the first grand prix of this year at Melbourne’s Albert Park on March 18, all but two of the 11 teams contesting the championship this season are taking part in two lengthy test sessions at the Sakhir circuit in Bahrain.

There were three consecutive days of running at the desert circuit in hot temperatures last week, finishing on Saturday, and three more are scheduled this week before the teams return to Europe to prepare for the trip to Australia.

Hamilton has been consistently in the top four throughout the Bahrain sessions and he finished second fastest on Saturday, only one tenth of a second slower than Fernando Alonso, the double world champion and his McLaren teammate.

The two McLaren drivers completed 126 laps between them on a track that features four long straights and tight corners at the end of each of them.

Hamilton was six-tenths clear of Felipe Massa, of Ferrari, who was third fastest, just ahead of his own teammate, Kimi Räikkönen.

The worrying element from McLaren’s point of view — as they try to bounce back from their worst season in ten years in 2006 — was that both their cars, the MP422s, succumbed to mechanical failure during Saturday’s running. Hamilton suffered an engine failure, while Alonso stopped with an oil leak, a fate that also befell Pedro de la Rosa, the McLaren test driver, during running on Thursday.

Testing, especially preseason testing when teams are trying myriad set-ups and using track time for a wide variety of purposes, can be a notoriously unreliable indicator of the true state of play. But even the most tentative analysis cannot avoid Hamilton’s consistency over a total of 223 laps spread over three sessions.

Moreover, apart from a big smash during a private McLaren test at Valencia late last month when Hamilton, from Tewin Wood in , wrote off his car after losing control at close to 185mph, his performance in Bahrain was matched in two earlier tests in Spain in Barcelona and Jerez.

The key question now is whether Hamilton can transfer this promising early form to the white heat of race days and qualifying, when he will have to prove that he can adapt his driving to meet the challenges that the vagaries of competition will confront him with.

There will be inevitable mistakes and errors of judgment in his rookie season, but the prediction in December by Ron Dennis, the McLaren team principal, that Hamilton could win a race in the second half of this year is not looking too wide of the mark. As for his battle for supremacy with Alonso, who is embarking on his sixth season in Formula One as the sport’s youngest double world champion, there is no doubt that the Spaniard has the edge at present. Hamilton, though, is not being overawed by his illustrious teammate; in Bahrain the Briton was looking confident and assured.

Alonso spoke frankly about Hamilton recently and he seems to have no doubts about his ability. “Already, in what little time I’ve seen of Lewis racing, I can see that he’s talented enough to know what he’s doing,” he said. “I have nothing to teach him. He knows already how to drive the car. He was born with his talent. Already he is very quick and there’s no doubt he will become a big star.”

Among other pointers in testing, Jenson Button in the new Honda looked good, running third fastest on two days in Bahrain, an encouraging sign after his comments last week that the new Honda RA107 is unlikely to be in a position to fight for victory in Melbourne because it is not fast enough.

A new aerodynamic package at Sakhir seems to have improved the car’s pace but handling and balance is still a problem. Button’s teammate, Rubens Barrichello, has complained that the car has a “bad habit” of losing rear grip when turning into a corner. After the sessions in Bahrain, Barrichello still sounded unhappy. “We still have still some fine-tuning to do on the car as the balance is not quite there yet,” he said, “so next week’s test will be important to help us resolve this before the season starts.”

Against this background of uncertainty over Button’s chances of being able to compete for a drivers’ championship in what will be his eighth season in Formula One, Honda will unveil a new green livery for their cars at London’s Natural History Museum today.

The cars are expected to have no sponsors’ logos on them and a new image designed to underline Honda’s environmental awareness.

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