What we learnt from Barcelona

Trying to achieve clarity after a compelling four days at the Circuit de Catalunya.

McLaren are still on a learning curve
Although it made for a good headline on Thursday night, Jenson Button's admission that McLaren are still striving to understand their new car really wasn't all that surprising when you stopped to consider the team's current plight. After all, from the moment the MP24-28 was unveiled with a radically-different design concept at rear and front, the widespread expectation was that the team would have a lot of learning to do in a very short period of time. As we ourselves concluded in our review of the 2013 car launches after applauding the team's bravery: 'Although it is reasonable to expect a relatively slow start from McLaren as they get to grips with their new design concept'. And that's what McLaren are experiencing at present. The car is fast - and has been very fast on occasion on all types of tyre. The problem is that, at other times, it has been surprisingly slow, and McLaren don't know precisely why. "It's been very tricky to understand where the car is: at times the car feels good, at other times it doesn't," said Jenson. "And a lot of that is basically understanding the car that we have and making sure it's working as we expect it to be working." At this stage, McLaren are probably only third or fourth favourites for Melbourne. All they can do is commit to as much lap time as possible next week and hold their nerve. They've taken their new car in a new direction because the MP4-27 had reached the ceiling of its design potential. Now's not the time for turning; now's the time for learning in the expectation of substantial dividends in the future. We're going to see a lot of pit-stops in 2013
After the fun of Jerez, tyres were the story of Barcelona, with the 2013 Pirellis regularly suffering sharp drop-off in performance after just a couple of laps. "These tyres are easy to understand, they just grain!" quipped Jenson. To a large extent, this week's unexpectedly-sharp decline was a result of the unexpectedly cool conditions and Pirelli themselves expressed confidence that "once we get to Melbourne the tyres should be much more within their intended working range, which will eliminate the unusual amount of degradation". However, there's also no doubt that this year's tyres will have a shorter shelf-life than their 2012 predecessors, which is why we saw so many practice pit-stops at Barcelona this week, with Red Bull (who are finally following their principal rivals in using a 'traffic light' system) devoting almost half a day to trials runs in the pits on Wednesday and Williams following suit on Friday afternoon. At least at the start of the season, when we could see three-or-four-stop races rather than one or two, a team's speed in the pits could prove decisive in determining the race winner. It's a sobering and not altogether welcome prospect. Speaking on Thursday after grappling with the new rubber, Mark Webber raised the bar even higher. "If you have a one-stop race, the result might be a little bit more fixed," he said. "But in a five-stop grand prix, things move around a little bit. "In general, I still think the quick guys will be strong at the end of the race. But I hope we don't have five-stop races because it's not really