The F1 launch season began in earnest earlier this week with the unveiling of the new Ferrari F10, the car scheduled to carry Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso through the coming year.  Hopes have been high for the F10 since the Maranello team’s designers, led by Aldo Costa and Nikolas Tombazis, abandoned work on last year’s F60 in order to concentrate their efforts on the 2010 machine.

The designers might have been hard at work, but one wonders whether the Original Thought department have been on an extended break.  It’s difficult to look at the F10 and escape the conclusion that Ferrari’s efforts were concentrated on borrowing design concepts from everyone else.  The most obvious visual differences from last year’s F60 are a new nose design heavily influenced by the Red Bull RB5, and sculpted sidepods oddly reminiscent of those seen on the BMW F1.09, a car which did nothing to mark itself out as ripe for plagiarising.

Also noticeable is the increased length of the car and resultant longer wheelbase, brought about by the need to accommodate a larger fuel tank than the one carried in 2009.

Rumours from Italy, reported in Britain by The Times but so far unsubstantiated, have it that there is some concern about the F10’s projected performance figures, and that a B-spec car is being hurriedly designed and put together to improve matters.  Any alarm would be caused by wind tunnel performance and simulation data, since the car has yet to run for the first time – cold, icy conditions at their Fiorano test base have prevented the team from giving the car a shakedown.

How much of a worry that is for fans of the Italian team isn’t clear; every single team will start the Bahrain Grand Prix with a car substantially modified from the one appearing at their launch.  Cars evolve, whatever their purpose, and a racing car evolving before the start of a season isn’t a story.  A fundamental redesign, though, would be an altogether different thing.  One to watch, perhaps.

Meanwhile, in Newbury, a place that rivals northern Italy for cold, ice and absolutely nothing else, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton unveiled the new McLaren MP4-25 earlier today.  Compared to last year’s MP4-24, a beautiful machine that was also desperately slow for much of its life, the most obvious visual differences from the front are a Red Bulling of the front end, albeit a much more conservative effort than Ferrari’s design, and a reshaping of the sidepod air intakes.

Compare the 2009 car with the new model side-on, however, and things are markedly different.

For a side-by-side comparison of MP4-24 and MP4-25 that doesn’t require you to flick between two links, direct your browser here.

The fin on the engine cover, the only blemish on an otherwise very attractive face, is designed to improve airflow to the rear wing and also accommodates a cooling duct made necessary by a repackaging of the car’s internal cooling systems.  The chassis and bodywork have been lowered, and the rear of the car has been modified to make better use of the double diffuser (banned for 2011, but very much a part of the 2010 regulations) that had to be hurriedly shoehorned into the back of most of last year’s grid.  As Nigel Mansell once famously said, “If it goes as fast as it looks, everyone else had better watch out.”

1995, of course, didn’t end all that well for Nigel.

With the knowledge gained during 2009’s rapid recovery fresh in their minds, it’s easy to assume that the MP4-25 will be as fast on the timesheets as it looks on camera.  Next week, we’ll take the first steps towards finding out how safe that assumption is.

The final grid will not be announced until tomorrow, since penalties must be assessed in the order that the original offences were committed.  What is it about watching the video and looking at the GPS data to see who went past the scene first that can possibly take until tomorrow?

I’ll start you off.  Buemi goes first, because it was his accident.  Barrichello, Button and Sutil went through in that order, as a quick look at the footage from the end of Q2 confirms.  Find where Alonso went through, and you’re golden.

The race began with Lewis Hamilton and Adrian Sutil on the front row, with Kimi Raikkonen in behind, the only three men running a two-stop race.  Star of qualifying Heikki Kovalainen led a pair of Brawns behind the two-stoppers, with the returning Vitantonio Liuzzi making it six Mercedes engines in the top seven cars.  If you want to get ahead, get a Merc; unquestionably, the German firm have the best engine in Formula One right now.

They also have the best KERS package, the extra 80 horsepower expected to propel Hamilton and Kovalainen to the front from the word go, with fellow booster Raikkonen tagging along for the ride.  Only some of that happened.  Hamilton’s getaway was ordinary, Kovalainen’s equally lacklustre, while Raikkonen got a flyer and would have led by a mile into the first chicane had he been able to find a way past the very, very wide McLaren dead ahead.  He couldn’t.  Sutil, the only one of the top four qualifiers lacking KERS, should have been swallowed up by Raikkonen and Kovalainen.  He wasn’t – Raikkonen just about made it by, but Kovalainen was busy losing a place to Barrichello, whose getaway from P5 was a sensational one.

Kovalainen, tipped for victory not just here but pretty much everywhere, had an opening lap that set the tone for his entire afternoon.  Barrichello was just about on the fair side of robust in his defence down into the Roggia chicane, and left even less margin on the way out.  Kovalainen had to check up, losing enough momentum to give Button a run up the inside through the Lesmo curves.  Before the end of the lap, Heikki would be assertively seen off by Tonio Liuzzi, in his first F1 opening lap since the end of 2007.

Heikki’s first lap was nothing, though, compared to that of Mark Webber, who was dumped into the Roggia gravel and firmly out of title contention by Robert Kubica’s BMW.  Kubica would go little further, cast out of contention by a steward-enforced pit stop to fix a loose front wing endplate and cast into retirement by either an oil leak or a desire to save the few engines he has left, depending on your level of cynicism.

The first couple of laps were frantic, with action throughout the pack as drivers struggled to get used to driving heavy cars with low downforce settings on cold tyres.  Watching Fisichella a million shades of sideways through Parabolica, it was easy to conclude that F1 should always look that way, with the best drivers in the world given licence to slide, drift and race.  The rest of the first stint would settle into the usual pattern of orderly queues, turbulent air and minimal on-track action.

Hamilton led, going away from Raikkonen whose wing mirrors were full of Sutil.  When Raikkonen shaves, he probably sees the front of a Force India in his bathroom mirror too.  Sutil was quicker but unable to pass, just as Fisichella had been at Spa, his caused not helped by an earlier first stop that dropped him briefly off the back of the Ferrari.  If Hamilton was going away, so Barrichello was just about keeping in touch, losing six or seven tenths per lap to the McLaren but inching away from Button at a slow but steady couple of tenths a lap.  Behind that, Liuzzi was heroically duking it out with Alonso, a battle he looked destined to win until a broken transmission brought a premature end to a stirring return.

Go back far enough from there and you eventually found Vettel, tugging around mid-pack with nothing like enough pace to do anything about it.  He would eventually earn something from the weekend, but not very much, and the 2008 Monza winner had plenty of time on track alone to wonder how different things might have been this year had his engines not continually blown themselves to bits.  His time will come, but it doesn’t look to have arrived yet.

Hamilton, whose time came the instant he made his F1 debut, had made his first stop with 17 seconds in hand on the first Brawn, but his rate of gain had slowed dramatically as the Brawn got lighter, Barrichello driving exceptionally to stay in touch.  Hamilton’s second stint would hold the key to the race outcome, and the signs from the opening laps were that it’d be grim news for the reigning champion.  Barrichello looked quick enough to come out as race leader once everyone had completed their scheduled pit stops, and with a heavier car Hamilton had no immediate answer.

Sutil might have had an answer for Raikkonen when the Ferrari’s second pit stop was slowed by a miscue, Kimi dropping the clutch before the team were quite ready and having to briefly pause for a second try.  The reason Sutil didn’t have an answer was that his pitstop had been worse, as pitstops tend to be when you lose control and run over some of your tyre changers.  One of the mechanics removed the car’s right wing mirror while trying to steady himself, but that mattered less than the time lost, enough time to see Kimi maintain the place.  What mattered more than anything was that all involved were unhurt, with the exception, one assumes, of Sutil’s pride.

Hamilton’s second stop was flawless, but he still emerged behind the consistently rapid Barrichello and, crucially, the equally steady Button, stringing together a competitive race distance for the first time in four months.  Jenson had no answer for Rubens, but it looked as if Lewis might have something in store for Jenson if he could only get close enough.  Whether he’d succeed was up for debate, but assuredly he would try.  Hamilton is a man incapable of sitting back and accepting that his position can’t be improved.

Further back, there was more refusal to accept the hand that had been dealt, this coming from a more surprising source.  Jarno Trulli, arch qualifier and renowned anti-racer, had grown bored of sitting behind Kazuki Nakajima and launched into a Hail Mary of a move into the first chicane, a move he then chickened out of before picking up again at the last minute.  Nakajima, the leading Williams and leading Toyota engine in a miserable race for the team and their engine supplier, turned in as normal, being boosted into the scenery for his troubles but maintaining his position.  The onlooking Glock, spying an opportunity to gain ground on his teammate, drew alongside Trulli on the flat-out run through Curva Grande, staying there through the Roggia chicane and into the first Lesmo.  Trulli, refusing to back down, stood firm until eventually ambition overtook adhesion, firing the Italian into the gravel for long enough to settle matters in Glock’s favour.

That, the best battle on the track, was for 12th position, the winner receiving nothing except the right to get back to the garage for a drink and a massage ahead of the other guy.  Trulli would later admit he’d grown bored behind Nakajima, and that the scrap with his teammate had livened up an otherwise dull afternoon.

Hamilton, with plenty to occupy him, had chipped away at Button but the Brawn appeared to have enough in hand.  Lewis, still refusing to accept defeat, pushed to the very end, setting the best first sector of the race on the final lap.  He wouldn’t make it to the end of the second sector, dangling a left-rear into the dirt on the outside of the first Lesmo and being fired across the track into an impact hard enough to tear pieces off the McLaren.  Better to crash while pushing for something than to finish through meek acceptance of your lot, goes the theory, and even if not everyone subscribes to that, Sunday afternoons are a lot livelier when watching people who do.  His slip promoted Raikkonen to 3rd, Sutil 4th, Alonso 5th, Kovalainen an anonymous 6th a minute down on the two Brawns he outqualified, Heidfeld 7th (41 straight race finishes now for Quick Nick, extending his record-breaking run) and Vettel to an 8th place that surely signalled the end of his title ambitions.

At the front, though, things were so similar to the early season that it was almost comforting.  Brawn had an answer for everyone, Button was back on form and back on the podium, but Barrichello put in one of the best drives of his career to claim his second win of the year.  It seems certain that one of these two will be crowned world champion at the end of the season, and Rubinho’s resurgence is enough to keep things open for now, but with the spring returning to the Button step, the Englishman remains the odds-on favourite.

The team on pole position for the Belgian Grand Prix, after a completely dry qualifying session, entered the weekend having never scored a point in Formula One.  The man in 2nd place had qualified 18th the week before, the man in 3rd hadn’t been in the top 10 all season to that point, and the man in 4th was starting 10 places ahead of his championship-leading teammate.  All so easy to forecast, it’s a wonder anyone bothers watching.

Qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix was as absorbing as it was baffling, and it left the race an utter nightmare to predict.  Some of us had a crack anyway, and found that while we generally did alright, we weren’t absolutely on the money:

Yes, the Force India isn’t exactly laden with fuel but nor is it ridiculously light.  Can it win?  No.  It can’t win, although it can and should score a decent haul of points, because it doesn’t have the pace to do so.

There were faster cars on the track this Sunday than the Force India, but not many, and not by much.  Giancarlo Fisichella, having one of those weekends that would have made him a superstar if it wasn’t for all the crushing mediocrity in between them, was absolutely mighty.  Fisi loves Spa, and clearly revelled in a car that got on with the circuit just as well, leading confidently from the start.  He didn’t win, but that wasn’t anything to do with his pace, which was more than good enough.  No, it was to do with something else:

The heavier runners – everyone from Rosberg backwards – would love there to be a safety car before they make their first stop, something that would wipe out their deficit to the lighter, faster machines ahead and give the leaders nothing like enough time to build the gap up again.  Some of them, chiefly Button, have an awful lot riding on it.

Jenson got his safety car on the first lap thanks to a multi-car shunt at the end of the back straight.  Unfortunately for the Englishman, his car was one of them.  At the head of the pack, Raikkonen made a mistake into the Les Combes chicane, creating a bottleneck that was clearing just as Button arrived.  That danger cleared, Button was doubtless highly amused when he was tipped into a race-ending spin by the suicidally late-braking Renault of Romain Grosjean, driving so much like friend of petrolheadblog.com Nelson Piquet Jr that it was almost heartwarming.  Lewis Hamilton, trying to pick his way through the aftermath, was speared by Jaime Alguersuari, who had ample space to drive his Toro Rosso past the McLaren but, for reasons best known to himself, elected not to bother.  Strike four cars, strike one title contender, and cue manic laughter in the cockpit of the other Brawn, inching closer to a title tilt that looked impossible two months ago.  Right?

Barrichello, 4th on the grid, is the lightest of the top 10, and on the face of it he doesn’t appear to be in contention.  He’ll be first frontrunner into the pits, just about capable of going beyond a single-figure lap count in the first stint, and even with a lighter car he couldn’t beat the Q3 interlopers.  Out of it, right?  An early pit stop at Spa shouldn’t prove too costly…he can win, as none of the cars directly ahead on the grid are likely to run away from him.

They did.  So did all of the cars behind him.  Yet again, an excellent Barrichello qualifying effort was ruined by his triggering the anti-win system at the start – again, the clutch was to blame, the noises from the team suggesting this was a technical issue and not operator error.  From 4th on the grid, Rubens ended up as good as last into La Source (the white car at the back of shot, if you’re struggling).  As his teammate Button retired, Rubens was too busy scampering across the infield trying to avoid crashing himself to celebrate.  In fighting form, the Brazilian had resolved that some points closer to the other Brawn was better than no points closer and, despite an oil leak in the final stages, would recover to 7th by the chequered flag, a result his car celebrated by ceremonially burning its own rear end.

Only Red Bull, then, could stop Jenson from getting away with his 5th nightmare weekend in succession:

Red Bull have the car to beat in race conditions.  Brilliantly fast and consistent over a series of laps regardless of which driver is at the wheel, the car looks supremely fast this weekend.  Their only problem is that their supremely fast car starts the race surrounded by slower ones.  The car has raw pace and Spa isn’t a particularly difficult track to pass on, so both drivers can still win the Grand Prix provided they make up a couple of places each off the line.

Mark Webber spent a lot of time surrounded by slower cars, and would surely have been alarmed to note that as the race went on, those slower cars became faster ones.  Particularly vexing was the presence of Nick Heidfeld’s BMW, forced by a risky Red Bull pit release into evasive action that would see Webbo hit with a perfectly just penalty for an unsafe pit exit.  Quick Nick was just that all afternoon, but a poor first lap condemned him to 5th, just behind and rapidly gaining on the other BMW of Kubica.

As Webber’s pace disappeared, Sebastian Vettel’s came on strong.  Blindingly fast on long runs, Seb’s qualifying error had left him with that bit too much to do.  He crossed the line 3rd, only a couple of seconds adrift of the magnificent Fisichella, but 6 points could have been 10 had he started nearer the front.  The more open goals Red Bull miss, the more secure the faltering Button becomes.

What of the suddenly competitive Toyota?

Like Fisi, Jarno’s been there or thereabouts all weekend, and his pace on long runs in practice compared favourably with everyone around him.  For team and driver, this is a big weekend, and it’s Toyota’s best chance yet of claiming that elusive maiden win.

Everything looked good for the first couple of hundred yards, that being the distance covered before Heidfeld dived inside Trulli and Trulli dived into the back of Heidfeld.  The resulting front wing damage necessitated a pit stop, in turn resulting in a loss of heart from Trulli so grave he found himself complaining on the radio that it was impossible to pass People’s Champion Luca Badoer.

Badoer, armed with KERS power boost, was lightning down the straights but treacle in the twisty bits, and must surely now have driven himself out of the second Ferrari.  The hot tip to replace him is, judging by the Italian media, anybody with a valid competition licence, though Fisichella seems to have the edge on everyone at present.  Fisi may wish to reflect that his Force India was quicker than the Ferrari this weekend – no, really, go back and read it again.  We’ll still be here when you’re done – and that if he jumps ship, his replacement (probably Vitantonio Liuzzi, Force India’s reserve driver) might have the best of the deal going into the next race at Monza.

He may, however, wish to reflect that even if the Force India was quicker, the result of everything we’ve covered so far was that the Ferrari won the race:

Kimi, remember, has KERS power boost on his car, which will be very useful on the run into La Source on lap 1 and a gift from Heaven on the run out of there.  We know Ferrari are better on race day, that they’re capable of producing a result by simply plodding around the track for longer than their rivals before pitting – witness Massa’s ascent of the scoring charts at Silverstone and again at the Nurburgring – and that Kimi’s special button is likely to have him ahead of the lighter men around him before the pitstops even begin.

Kimi was perhaps fortunate to escape censure for a premeditated attempt to redefine the racetrack at La Source on the first lap – before the track was remodelled, everyone ran very wide there to get better exit speed, which Kimi did this year in spite of the track boundary clearly being 20 feet to the right of where he was – but from there his special button usage was exemplary.  Up to 2nd by the top of the hill, he might not have got close enough to pass Fisichella had it not been for that safety car.  One doubts that Kimi reflected on that as he KERSed his way past the helpless Force India on the restart, but he’ll have been well aware of it later in the race, as KERS became the only thing keeping Raikkonen out of range of the fundamentally faster man behind.

A feature designed to create overtaking, then, spent 10 seconds doing so and the rest of the Grand Prix thwarting Fisichella’s best efforts to respond in kind.  It had robbed us of a remarkable win, but what was left was still an extraordinary fairy story, one of the low-budget minnows rising to the top and taking on the big spending heavy hitters using nothing but genuine pace.  For one week only?  Nobody would dare to say.

It got a one-man show.  The bare stats show that Sebastian Vettel won the British Grand Prix by 15.188 seconds from his Red Bull teammate Mark Webber, setting the fastest lap having started from pole position.  They don’t show that he spent half the race taking things relatively steadily.  Dig deeper and you find that of the 20 fastest race laps recorded, 15 belonged to Vettel, and only one of those was recorded after lap 20.  You find that in those first 20 laps Sebastian was, on average, over one second a lap quicker than Rubens Barrichello in P2.  Consider that he was doing that in a car fuelled longer than any of his major rivals, and yet could have pitted before them and still retained his lead, and you realise that Vettel’s win was more than dominant.  It was crushing.

For there to be any drama at the front, there needed to be a change in the order at the start.  Vettel’s getaway from his brilliant pole position was only middling, but he was quick to shrug off the attentions of Barrichello, whose start was better but not nearly good enough to matter.  Webber, the only man with any hope of beating Vettel, couldn’t clear the Brawn on the first lap, and so as they came through Woodcote for the first time it was Vettel, Barrichello, Webber at the front.  What it wasn’t, though, was a contest.

In truth, there weren’t many of those taking place at the sharp end.  Nakajima held a confident 4th early on, hassled to some degree by Raikkonen, who’d hooked up beautifully off the line and then KERSed his way up to 5th by the exit of Copse.  Rosberg had gained off the line too, losing out to Kimi but passing the slow-starting Trulli and championship leader Button, who’d made a decent start but was forced into following the tardy Toyota ahead.  Things could have been worse for the Englishman, who looked doomed to a long and depressing first stint behind Massa’s Ferrari and his KERS button until the Brazilian ran wide through Chapel on lap 2, granting Jenson the opportunity to spend a long and depressing first stint behind Trulli instead.

The gaggle from 4th back to 9th was tightly bunched alright, but it wasn’t close enough to provide any kind of shot at overtaking.  For that, the crowd had to turn to Nick Heidfeld, who’d damaged his front wing at the start and was busily holding up a train of cars headed by Alonso and Hamilton but not Giancarlo Fisichella, who’d taken advantage of Nick and Fernando exploring the outskirts of Stowe on lap 2 to nip cannily by in the improving Force India.

Heidfeld was losing alarming amounts of time but, despite the best persuasive efforts of his race engineer on the radio, opted to stay out on track until his first scheduled pit stop instead of pitting early for a replacement.  This did little to improve the mood of Alonso, already unhappy in a Renault that appears to be making progress in the wrong direction and now confronted with a slow and remarkably wide BMW.  The Spaniard’s efforts to get by were by turns inventive, ingenious and desperate – trying all possible lines into Stowe, working the inside and outside of Vale, the outside of Club and finally the entry and exit of the Abbey chicane - the only thing they all had in common being that none of them worked.  Lurking in the background, home favourite Lewis was forever threatening to strike but being thwarted by a top gear just short enough to have his Mercedes engine bouncing off the rev limiter whenever he caught the Renault’s slipstream.

At the front, it was as-you-were, Vettel on the ragged edge but never beyond it and drawing away quickly from Barrichello, who couldn’t do a thing to shake Webber.  The Brawn was still struggling to generate heat in its tyres, a problem that left Rubens powerless to defend his position from Webber when the Australian put in a couple of quick laps in the clear air left when the Brawn pitted.  After a further 40 laps of nothing much, Vettel, Webber and Barrichello would arrive at the finish in that order.

The remaining interest in the race surrounded the battle for the lower points places.  Nakajima had driven an excellent first stint and would have spent all of Sunday night working out how exactly he ended up finishing 11th, the last man on the lead lap.  His problem, one shared by Raikkonen, was that he’d been fuelled relatively light and couldn’t maintain a strong enough pace to stay in contention after the necessarily early first pit stop.  Benefitting from the opposite set of circumstances were Nico Rosberg, solidly in 5th place in the Williams, and Felipe Massa, who’d recovered from his earlier Chapel indiscretion and found himself in 4th place through no more complex a tactic than driving around longer than the people around him before pitting.  Around the time of the second pit stops it looked as though Massa might pip his countryman Barrichello to the final podium place, but when Rubens emerged from the pits on lap 47 not far under 10 seconds to the good it became clear that 4th would be Felipe’s limit.  6th and stalking the pair ahead of him was Button, who’d suddenly found the Brawn to his liking late on after 50 laps spent describing its many faults – high-speed understeer, unpredictable tyre behaviour, hitting the floor through Copse – in great detail.  Willed on by the suddenly enlivened home support, Jenson made it onto the back of Nico’s Williams but found that he was unable to do anything about passing once he got there.  It was a depressingly familiar story on a day that demonstrated again how this year’s design regulations haven’t gone quite far enough to improve how Formula One cars behave in turbulent air.  It’s one thing to follow more closely than before, quite another to follow closely enough for it to matter.

What of the other British driver, the man who’d won at Silverstone by over a minute in the sopping wet 2008 race?  Lewis Hamilton’s afternoon was torrid, going only downhill after Alonso unwittingly bundled him off the racetrack while recovering from an error at Chapel.  A gutsy pass on the same man for 16th place – quite possibly the finest two drivers to have ever contested that position in a Grand Prix – at Copse on lap 30 was a highlight, his error and subsequent loss of that position in the Becketts complex a lap later a low.  Later in the race, chasing the one-stopping Nelson Piquet Jr as if it meant anything, Lewis dangled two wheels on the grass under braking for Vale, the resulting pirouette costing him time and a little pride but not a lot else.

Things were no better for Alonso, who’d eventually come home a lapped 14th a couple of places behind his much maligned teammate (boosted, one assumes, by the PetrolheadBlog GP contract in his back pocket), or for Hamilton’s McLaren partner Heikki Kovalainen.  Heikki made his one and only fuel stop on lap 33, emerging just ahead of Hamilton, who was due to pit again and whose day hardly needed to be made any worse, and Sebastien Bourdais.  Having let Hamilton get on with his race, the Finn then made to let Bourdais by too exiting Stowe, realised his error and jinked to the middle of the racetrack, then wandered off to the left again at the braking point for Vale.  Bourdais, who might have been able to avoid the McLaren had he known which bit of racetrack it would be occupying when he got to it, creamed into the back of it hard enough to end both of their afternoons.  The blame lay largely at Kovalainen’s constantly-moving door, though whether the late-braking Frenchman could ever have made it around Vale without Heikki’s help was open to debate.  It was a debate rendered moot by the announcement that the Toro Rosso’s water pressure was falling and his retirement had been imminent in any case.

There were no such dramas for Toro Rosso’s sister team.  Vettel and Webber brought the Red Bulls home to a 1-2 finish, just as they had in China, and in a further echo of that race they were trailed home by a Brawn that didn’t at any point manage to get the tyre temperature it needed to go racing.  Vettel’s drive was a masterful display of performance driving, dancing on the edge of adhesion in the early laps without ever looking like making an error, then consolidating what he had for the rest of the race.  Sebastian is not yet 22 years old, and his driving is still marked by the sort of errors a man with so little experience can’t yet have had the chance to eradicate, but already he is unbeatable on his day.  The worry for the rest of the grid is that as he matures, his day will come around far more often.

• Silverstone was once an airfield.  On race day it becomes the busiest heliport in the United Kingdom.  Operational airfields and heliports should ideally have little in the way of naturally rugged terrain around – nothing spoils your VIP flight into the circuit more than a near-miss with the side of a hill, so exposed flatlands are what you want.  Silverstone is surrounded by flatlands.  Exposed flatlands, like Formula One cars, are susceptible to wind.  Today’s winds played merry havoc with the balance of the cars.  If the wind strength or direction change tomorrow, all of the work done tuning the cars for the conditions will be undone, and none of what follows will be worth very much…

• Red Bull look phenomenally quick.  The car is balanced and poised on track, and both Vettel and Webber look comfortable at the wheel, able to string together fast, consistent laps.  As things stand, they’re the best bet for victory, Webber the more convincing of the pair so far.  The car’s new fatter nose, though (for those who haven’t seen it, point your search engine in the direction of Kirstie Alley’s last two appearances on Oprah and you’ll get the idea soon enough) has turned it into Kate’s Dirty Facially Challenged Sister.

• It’s too early to write off Brawn GP.  Then again, how could you begin to write off the winners of every dry-weather race this season so far?  Both cars looked poor today, Barrichello looking for grip in all the wrong places while Button battled a car bouncing uncomfortably across bumps and understeering the instant it so much as looked at a corner.  Temperatures today were cool, and we’ve seen already this year that the price to be paid for looking after their tyres in hot weather is that the Brawns can’t heat them sufficiently when it’s chilly.  Warmer weather is forecast for the rest of the weekend, particularly Sunday, which should play into their hands.  Consider too that Button’s Sliverstone Friday was no more miserable than his Istanbul practice, and he didn’t do at all badly for the rest of that weekend.  Rubens was again Brawn’s practice pacesetter, and it’s essential for him, his fans and anyone wanting the title battle to last past August that he maintains his edge on Button through the rest of the weekend’s running.

• The established top guns of seasons past continue to struggle.  The Ferrari looked loaded with understeer all afternoon, Raikkonen ploughing straight ahead at Copse while Massa managed to stay broadly within the defined racetrack without ever managing to take full control of his car’s wandering front end.  Silverstone has the kind of long straights leading into hard braking that should make KERS handy, but the advantage of KERS is negated by the car’s apparent deficiencies in the high speed, aero-critical sweepers that characterise the circuit.  McLaren are barely any better placed, but their problems lie at the back of the car, Lewis Hamilton in particular indulging in the kind of frantic arm-waving you’d expect of a man fighting off the unwanted attentions of a squid.  The team are pushing hard to improve their car – this morning, they studied the airflow across Hamilton’s car by sending it out covered in fluorescent paint – but progress appears slow.  Updates are promised for the Nurburgring race in three weeks, and for all involved they can’t come quickly enough.

• BMW would go further faster if their car didn’t break down quite so often.  Robert Kubica’s engine was changed with impressive haste in the afternoon session, though given the number of engines he’s been through already this year one assumes his mechanics are well-practiced.  Mario Theissen said recently that BMW did not in fact scuttle their 2008 campaign early to focus on creating an all-conquering 2009 car.  Apparently, since there was tension between the team Kubica, they didn’t want to make things worse by contradicting his public assertion that the team had given up on his title charge.  It all sounds a lot like face-saving, board-appeasing nonsense from a man who knows full well that in focusing on a 2009 that is proving disastrous, BMW may have unwittingly thrown away as good a world title shot as they’ll ever have.

The betting men amongst our number might want to put a couple of their native currency on a Red Bull pole position tomorrow afternoon.  With the kind of pace they’ve shown so far relative to absolutely everyone else, can they lock out the front row while carrying a halfway sensible fuel load for once?  In an unforgivable dereliction of duty, some of us are working and then daring to have a social life when they should be hunching over a keyboard, but we’ll weigh them up as soon as there’s time.