Vettel win ominous for season ahead

The 2011 F1 season kicked off at the scenic Albert Park circuit in Melbourne this weekend, but those hoping for a typically spectacular Australian GP would come away disappointed. 2010 champion Sebastian Vettel fired a warning shot in qualifying by taking the first pole of the 2011 season by a massive 7 tenths of a second, and followed it up by taking victory at a canter on Sunday.

While Red Bull team mate Mark Webber struggled to match his pace, Vettel has shown that the Renault-powered RB7, designed by Adrian Newey, is comfortably the quickest car in the field, even without using the KERS power boost system which the team elected to take off after Friday practice. It seems the 2011 car is a capable successor to the previous two Red Bulls, both of which were the fastest cars in their fields for at least half a season, and even at this early stage, it’s difficult to see where a challenge could come from.

The only man who could get anywhere near the German was McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, but even he could only watch as Vettel cruised away in the first couple of laps. But there are positives for Hamilton, team mate Jenson Button and the rest of the Woking team, who endured a difficult winter testing period and were expected to be struggling in the midfield, and yet emerged as Red Bull’s nearest challengers. 2009 champion Button was hit by a drive-through penalty after cutting a corner while trying to overtake Ferrari’s Felipe Massa and not letting the Brazilian back past, and thus could only manage 6th.

Ferrari themselves were disappointing. Having been tipped to be competing with Red Bull, Massa and Fernando Alonso could only qualify a distant 8th and 5th respectively, and the race was little better, with Alonso once again finding himself stuck behind Renault’s Vitaly Petrov, the man who had thwarted his title ambitions in Abu Dhabi in November. As then, he could not get ahead of the Russian, who secured his first F1 podium, a great boost for the team who are without Robert Kubica after his serious rallying accident.

Another team who can take heart from the first weekend is Sauber. Eyebrows had been raised when they signed Mexican rookie Sergio Perez alongside the inexperienced Kamui Kobayashi, but they vindicated their team’s decision by bringing their cars home 7th and 8th, ahead of Massa, only for both to be disqualified for a minor technical infringement. Despite this setback, they have shown the pace of the car is there, and Perez has marked himself as one to watch this year.

Sauber’s exclusion was good news for Paul di Resta, who inherited the point for 10th place on his debut. The Scot had beaten his more experienced Force India team mate Adrian Sutil in qualifying but had to concede to the German in the race. But it was otherwise a disappointing weekend for the team, along with two other English-based teams that carry other flags – both Team Lotus and Virgin Racing, entering their second seasons in F1, seem to have made no progress at all over the winter, if anything falling further behind the rest of the field.

But that is nothing compared to the suffering of Hispania. Despite promising all winter that they would not fall foul of the reintroduced 107% qualifying limit, both Vitantonio Liuzzi and Narain Karthikeyan failed to qualify their untested cars for the race, and had to pack up and leave early. The lack of sponsorship on the cars, with only backing from Tata brought by Karthikeyan present on the cars other than stickers that read ‘This could be you’ and ‘This is a cool spot’, are equally worrying.

While the Spanish team have survived the winter against the odds, and did produce a “new” car, it remains to be seen how much longer they will be able (or allowed) to continue in F1 if they can’t make it into the races every week. The next race in Malaysia will be crucial – if they can make progress there, they may be able to hang on, but if not, you would think it would be unlikely that they will still be around come the last race in Brazil in November.

The other main talking point over the Australian weekend was the new DRS (drag reduction system) – or, to the rest of us, the moveable rear wing. Introduced to try and create more overtaking opportunities, there seemed to only be a couple of occasions in the race where it had any effect. But while it would be easy to write it off at this stage as ineffective, surely there is little difference between this and, say, the referral system in cricket – it has redressed the balance to help the car behind. And ultimately it made no difference to the race itself, as the reason it wasn’t a classic was not because of a lack of overtaking, but because Vettel was dominant, and we have to hope that this was just a one off.