Australian GP review and thoughts

Well, it was an eventful race, wasn't it. And pretty near the worst kind of start for Ferrari. And near best possible start for McLaren, in particular for Lewis Hamilton.

But lets dig deeper.

Lewis Hamilton. Had a perfect weekend. Pole position, fastest lap (I think, I haven't seen the stats yet) and easy cruise to win. Managed to avoid most of the hassles with the pace car that messed up so many others including his team mate Heikki Kovalainen. Great race, Lewis. You earned the 10 points and a winner needs to be lucky. Perfect start to the season.

So Heikki? The qualifying could have been better but still starting on the second row was not bad. Then the race, he was right with it at the front, until unfortunate timing with his pit stop and a pace car. Was heading for a podium now that was lost. Still he at least brought the car to the finish. (this also means the McLaren is a solid and fast car to start the season)

Which is not what can be said of the Prancing Horse. Ferrari had horrible reliability issues, from Kimi's fuel pump in the qualifying to his engine dying at the race. And Massa lost his engine in the race. Come on, Ferrari. This is not the right time to produce unreliable cars! But yes, Kimi. So he started from 15th. Massa proved the car was good enough to be a front runner. So Kimi started to pass cars and by the time of his pit stops, Kimi had fought himself to third place.

As Kimi was on a one-stopper strategy, and his front-running rivals were two-stopping, at that point - when Kimi wanted to pit - he had in effect fought himself to the podium, and was very realistically fighting for the win. But then he had his major bit of bad luck with the pace car. As he could not enter the pits, with dead tyres, he was stuck going around the track several more times behind the pace car, with dead tyres now having no grip and losing whatever little bit of heat they might have held, Kimi then on the re-start ended driving off the track. Very luckily he avoided a crash, and returned - but due to the pace car situation, now all remaining cars had shot past him - this would never happen in normal race conditions if a driver overshoots a curve, he'd lose one maybe two places. Now Kimi went from third to I think 11th, anyway, dead-last in the queue. He must have been devastated.

Still, he fought back. Had his pit stop, fresh tyres, fought himself into about 5th or so, until again his tyres and now probably also engine (and pretty messed up car overall) were letting him down. So he finished 9th, but because Barrichello was disqualified, he picked up one point for 8th finish.

Yes, a pitiful performance, with several spectacular spins and driver errors - but I'm totally willing to forgive these for his brave fighting to overtake and get up the order, first from 15th to 3rd, and then again from 11th to 5th. His 8th place finish is not in any way a fair haul of points for what he did on Sunday.

But it does mean, that Ferrari do have a fast car. And a nimble car. And it suits Kimi's driving style. But he is now 9 points behind Hamilton. Not the best way to start the season. Expect Kimi to be very fired up for Malaysia.

Meanwhile Massa? Felipe, Felipe? What happened. You were Ferrari's front runner. You should have finished well ahead of Kimi, essentially in the same car. Certainly, where you start 4th and Kimi starts 15th, when the race is ten laps in, we'd expect the car running 6th to be you and the car running 20th to be Kimi, not the other way around !!

I think Massa showed again that he is prone to errors out of pressure. The spin on the first lap by Massa was not caused by any contact with any other driver. That was just driver error on new tyres at the start of the race, in relatively clear field position (not the heavily over-congesed mid-field); in short an un-forced error. Bad move Massa. Very bad. But his engine did break already at half distance so we never know if he might have had more luck in the roulette of the pace cars of this peculiar race.

Now then BMW? I wrote in my last prediction, that I expected BMW had been going backwards during the winter. Now we have Heidfeld finishing second and Kubica was running very well earlier in the race. What happened? It seems that BMW has been fooling the press and pundits, by "sandbagging" or hiding their true speed in the winter trials. Maybe they carried some extra weight in the car, to not reveal just how fast they were. Ha-ha, pretty clever... BMW seems very strong and will challenge McLaren and Ferrari for the podiums each race. I think they'll be winning their first race this season - and inspite of this race, I still think Kubica is the better driver, he'll be most likely the one to do it (with a bit more luck).

Then Williams. This team seems to be true to the pre-season form, taken giant steps ahead during the pre-season. Certainly the podium was a lot of luck with both Ferrari's out and Kovalainen behind them and only one BMW finishing the race, but still, Williams was clearly faster than Renault or the Red Bull. Happy to see Nico up there - and obviously Lewis and Nico are best friends, happy too to see such friendship among athletes who are technically rivals.

Alonso, drove a solid drive to fourth, well in excess of what the Renault really was able to do. Also Nakajima was clearly well behind his team mate in the other Williams. They picked their points simply because the rest of the field had not finished as they normally would do. The bit of particular joy for me was Toro Rosso and Sebastian Bourdais. The Toro Rosso was strong in pre-season and while its quite a long-shot for them to be in the points, happy they scored some on Sunday.

A few other observations. Nelsinho Piquet Jr was to me a big disappointment all through the weekend. I hope this is just rookie nerves, and he'll settle down much like Heikki did last year (he also started horribly badly in Australia).

I would have really wanted to see Barrichello actually win those points he had which he lost with the disqualifications. He is driving a dog of a car in the Honda, he's also that old, that he won't have many races left - maybe this season, but even one more season is starting to ask quite a lot. So these may have been his last legitimate chances for points. Shame about that.

Seven cars finished. I don't remember the race I saw that happen before ( there was once I have seen very long ago when there were less cars to physically finish than who won points, ie points were given to at least one car that did not finish) but its been a very long time.

Now to Malaysia. This race is more "normal" as a measure of team performance (Australia so often is peculiar and not really indicative)

Oh, and if you believe in omens, the winner of Australia tends to win the season. Bodes very well for Lewis Hamilton and McLaren. Still, I am sure Kimi is more happy to be in the Ferrari, even with broken fuel pump and engine, than being back at the Silver Arrows. Expect Kimi to be in top form in Kuala Lumpur...