Slow BIOS POST boot behavior of approx. 40 seconds

[a_cat]

I recently got an HP EliteBook 845 G9.

Before installing the latest BIOS version 01.04.01 Rev.A, the POST process was already quite slow for a modern laptop: After pressing the power button, the screen stays black for about 10 seconds. Following that the screen shows the HP logo and the Wolf Pro Security logo. It stays there for another 5 seconds. After that the actual OS is booted (the OS loading indicator and for Linux also a logo appears). So about 15 seconds of delay before the OS is booted which is already quite slow in my opinion and also compared to every other laptop that I've owned in the past.

I've installed the latest BIOS verion 01.04.01 Rev.A mainly because of this issue, but now the POST process is even slower: 10 seconds of black screen (same as before) but then the laptop stays on the HP/Wolf Pro Security logo screen for 25-30 seconds. So the whole POST before the OS is even starting to boot takes round about 40 seconds. This is really frustrating as I'm always turning off my EliteBook for the full disk encryption to be effective.

I'm currently on Fedora Linux but it's the same problem when using Windows: It doesn't seem like this is related to the OS at all. Even when I'm only booting to the BIOS settings/startup options, it takes the full 25-30 seconds after pressing Esc for the HP BIOS startup options to be shown. System Diagnostics reports all components as working correctly.

What I've done for testing:

I'm normally using DriveLock but for testing I've disabled that. I've disconnected all external devices from the laptop. I've disabled all security settings, all ports, all verification prompts, all internal devices like Bluetooth/Wifi/Smartcard reader /Fingerprint sensor etc., all remote management and CPU options in BIOS. I've tried it with Fast Boot and Secure Boot enabled and disabled.

Non of these settings mattered: POST still takes the same amount of time.

This leads to the following questions:

1. Is there some option or key combination to get any POST logs on the HP/Wolf Pro Security screen to further analyze this? Maybe this kind of log output would indicate why it takes so long.

2. What can I do to resolve this? My workflow includes often powering off and on my EliteBook and I'm seriously  considering returning because of these issues. I really don't want to wait 40 seconds each time. The OS itself takes like 2-3 seconds to load after this slow POST so my only issue is the BIOS being slow here.