Bahrain was great news for Ferrari, Lotus and sports hoping to lure sponsors away from F1...
The plusses and minuses from the Bahrain Grand Prix
The Bahrain GP was great news for Ferrari, Lotus and sports hoping to lure sponsors away from Formula One after a fairly dull start to the new season.
Here
Andrew Davies looks at the winners and losers from the 2010 opener.
WINNERS
Fernando Alonso
It was a toss up really between Vettel, Massa and Alonso. Vettel did a lot better than Alonso in qualifying, but Alonso played a very patient waiting game during the race. The second he was past Vettel he put an emphatic distance between himself and the only man who could conceivably have beaten him, Felipe Massa.
Given that the temperatures in Bahrain were a lot hotter than we will get in Europe it should be worrying for the rest of the field just how comfortable Ferrari looked. Alonso now joins a long list of Ferrari greats who have won on their debut for the Scuderia. Quite unfairly, the driver who has done the most for the marque isn't among them - though he did finish sixth on Sunday.
Felipe Massa, Ferrari
Felipe Massa showed that missing the latter half of the season hasn't dulled his ability. Simply the fact that he outqualified Alonso on Saturday proved that he was right back on it. Alonso's grown out of the habit of his team-mate outqualifying him - it happened so rarely at Renault. Massa versus Alonso is going to be one of the duels of the season.
Lewis Hamilton, McLaren
Had Massa not tried to run Lewis off the road on the opening lap then he could well have been second. Replays showed that the McLaren was quite a way ahead of the Ferrari and should have been given room...but he was on the outside, always a thorny issue. Lewis took it with a chuckle when he saw it on the post-race re-runs; had that been Jarno Trulli (after Brazil 2009) then he would have taken a photo and rammed it into Felipe's helmet.
Given his qualifying form (a second off pole), third place was not too bad a result, however without the rear-wing stalling knee flap giving them a straight line advantage they would probably have been behind the Force Indias.
Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull
It's not all doom and gloom for Sebastian Vettel. It may not be a point-of-view he'll air in public, but scoring 4th when Mark Webber could only manage a distant 8th is a bit of a result. With Massa and Alonso, Rosberg and Schumacher (you'd hesitate to say Hamilton and Button) so evenly matched if Seb can work his way into a position where he is the clear Red Bull favourite for the Championship, then that might be a big advantage.
Nico Rosberg, Mercedes
Rosberg was quicker than his more illustrious team-mate all weekend and the race proved no different. He neatly took advantage of Hamilton's error on Lap 1 and only a bit of cruel timing during the pit-stops deprived him of 4th, maybe even 3rd place.
Tonio Liuzzi, Force India
Liuzzi lucked into a good position on the opening lap and held onto it. Had Sutil and Kubica not been tripped up by Webber's Renault smoke machine, though, it would have been a different story.
Lotus Team
A great debut from the Lotus team - both cars almost to the finish and Kovalainen's final lap - a personal best - was just two seconds off Nico Rosberg's final lap (and you can bet he was not easing up in his pursuit of Vettel to the flag).
LOSERS
Mark Webber, Red Bull
Webbo had a car capable of the front row of the grid but never got the clear air to prove it. He was perhaps fortunate not to end the opening GP 20+ points behind his team-mate. If Bridgestone keep on delivering kind and forgiving tyres then the 2010 season will simply boil down to getting a good place in qualifying then holding it through the race - a situation that won't suit Mark as much as his team-mate.
Michael Schumacher, Mercedes
I don't think anyone would have expected Nico Rosberg to be constantly 0.3 to 0.4 seconds a lap quicker than Michael Schumacher on Friday and Saturday. In the race he just about held on to Rosberg. Credit to the old geezer he never let the gap in the race go out to more than five seconds and most of the time it was around four. For any other returning 41-year-old F1 driver that would have been a result, but the expectation level is always going to be impossibly high with Michael. Maybe it's a good job he didn't get into last year's difficult F60.
Jenson Button, McLaren
Poor qualifying again let Button down. Pre-season all the talk was about Jenson's smooth driving style suiting the dreadful tyre wear that would take place, but in the event the Bridgestone Supersoft Option tyres looked capable of running 25 laps. Jenson started 8th and he finished 7th and it was like one of those races at the back end of last season when he was capable of going faster but got stuck in traffic.
Adrian Sutil, Force India
Mark Webber got away with not lining up in his box properly and then unleashing the kind of smoke screen last seen being emitted from the back of James Bond's Aston Martin DB6. Kubica and Sutil were the innocent victims. Charlie Whiting should have a word with Red Bull because if the car does it again then that's surely causing an avoidable accident.
Virgin Team
The Virgin team lived up to the pre-season billing of being fast-but-fragile, with Timo Glock overtaking the lead Lotus of Heikki Kovalainen at one stage, before he started to shed gears.
Bahrain GP Attendance
Not quite as bad as Turkey, but judging from the drivers' walk to the podium at least half of those attending the race were air stewardesses. As a cruel trick Emirates Airlines had asked all their tallest girls to come along and so on the way to the podium, Fernando, Felipe and Lewis had to run the gauntlet of the applauding giant women.
Non-refuelling races
Already there are calls for the innovative PF1 Tour de France chicane to be introduced to circuits to break up the action and stop the endless following. Bernie assured us personally that his idea of the Q3 drivers racing with their qualifying tyres would spice up the action. It hasn't. If all the Schumi/Jenson/Alonso/Massa/Lotus hype had attracted wavering motorsport fans to revisit the sport, then this must have been an almighty turn-off. Who had the brilliant idea of starting the season in Bahrain?
New points system
It's all very well changing the points system to reward winners over second places, but what about days like this? Surely the new points system should also have some kind of safeguard so that teams - once they get into a 1-2 position - don't turn their engines to the cruise-and-collect mapping.
As it was, Alonso looked unbeatable and Felipe just couldn't get near him, but if Ferrari are going to have engine reliability issues this year then they are not going to want their drivers to risk engine failures by pushing each other too hard.
If Alonso had failed to get past Massa at turn 2 then we could have had the scenario of Alonso right on Massa's gearbox for a race.
Given that Felipe's a bit of a banzai Q3 specialist he will outqualify Alonso again soon. The old Ferrari maxim was to race each other until the final pit-stop, but when the final pit-stop is on Lap 16 then what do you do...?
