The Spanish GP talking points

Nosing about for change

If it feels as if the nascent 2015 season has been shaped by a series of reoccurring themes – Nico Rosberg’s failure to match Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari’s punchy form against Mercedes, Williams’ isolation as the third-fastest outfit on the grid – then it is largely because the year has indeed been stuck on repeat.

Setting a new F1 record, the same three drivers – Hamilton, Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel – appeared on the podium at the first three races, and all that changed on the Bahrain rostrum was the identity of the driver in red when Kimi Raikkonen replaced Vettel. Beyond that tweak, F1 in 2015 has been a matter of regular routine.

With an avalanche of upgrades scheduled for Barcelona, the gateway for the European leg of the campaign, there's a tantalising possibility that a midfield runner may take a sudden leap forward to join Mercedes and Ferrari at the front. The stronger likelihood, however, is that their duopoly on podium finishes will only be challenged if unreliability strikes. Even if a Red Bull or a Williams discover substantial performance improvement, Mercedes and Ferrari already have plenty in hand over the rest – and in any case, they won’t have been idle over the three-week break either.

But the questions of whether Williams can keep ahead of Red Bull and just how much of a gain the former world champions can deliver are altogether different matters. Rumour has it that Red Bull plan to run a radically-different nose in Spain that is such a departure from their previous design, and such an extreme interpretation of what the rulebook permits, that it reportedly only passed the mandatory crash test at the fourth time of asking. To be worth that amount of fuss - and reputed expense - Red Bull must be extremely confident their new nose will sniff out a big gain on track too. Enough to overtake Williams? Enough to pull in Mercedes and Ferrari? We’ll see. 

The telling tiredness of waiting for Lewis to sign up

Don’t sigh and stop with the rolling of your eyes. If you’re sick and tired of waiting for proper news about Lewis Hamilton’s new contract with Mercedes – you know the thing, it's called official confirmation – then that is exactly the point. The fact that it is still a non-story, a month after Lewis assured reporters that the deal was “99.6% done”, is why it is a story. The longer the delay, the louder the doubts.

The sensible explanation for the wait is an endorsement of the official line: he’s still haggling over the small print, eking out every paddock pass and trophy guarantee he can muster, sufficiently relaxed about his future employment prospects to drag negotiations out without any sort of fixed timetable in mind.

Still, the longer he refrains from signing his career away for another two or three years, the greater temptation to wonder if another factor is at play. Especially after he told the BBC in Bahrain that “I grew up a fan of Ferrari”. He couldn't, could he?

Lewis, you terrible tease.  

The Iceman Cometh (again)

If it’s team-mate wars we want up at the sharp end then right now Ferrari, and not Mercedes, is the most intriguing battlefield. Such is the hold that Lewis Hamilton currently exerts over Nico Rosberg, one wonders what – if anything – the latter can do to re-assert himself. It very much looks like Lewis has Nico right where he wants him – that place being the very same Sebastian Vettel dragged (metaphorically, of course) Mark Webber to after winning his first title in 2010. It’s the place where a team with two number one drivers discovers that one is performing so much better than the other that the headaches they previously experienced start to subside a little. The paradox of in-house competition slowly, inevitably, resolves itself, a natural order emerges – and we all start to feel a bit sorry for the one who’s getting his butt kicked week in, week out.

Maybe Rosberg will defy expectations this weekend; for the sake of the championship we can only hope so. But the competition appears far more delicately poised right behind the Silver Arrows: Ferrari have, of course, been breathing down Mercedes’ neck and, what’s more, Kimi Raikkonen has been doing the same to Vettel. Except in Bahrain, where he got the better of him. So has Seb really got his mojo back as we thought after Malaysia? Or is it more a case – yet again - of the Iceman Cometh?

Perhaps, like Kimi, it’s best to put on a pair of chunky sunglasses and mumble ‘It’s difficult to say’. Finally at home in a Ferrari second time around, the Finn could conceivably have won in Bahrain had Merc’s brake wear been just that little bit more marginal. And then there’s the question of Raikkonen’s race strategy last time out: was it really symptomatic of a number one status on Vettel’s part? Don’t these things have to be earned?

Let’s hope so, because Kimi’s performances have, so far this season, been hugely encouraging. More pertinently, they’re also of the sort he managed the last time he drove a James Allison-designed car at Lotus and show that, even though Raikkonen might no longer be capable of producing the ultimate pace he managed in sprint-era F1, that natural waning has dovetailed nicely with the demands of tyre-limited racing.

Of course, given his record so far in the Pirelli era, the same could also be said of Vettel and perhaps he will indeed prevail over the course of 19 races. But if the four-time champion’s crown was tarnished by his final season at Red Bull, only more shine will be taken off the more successes Raikkonen has. The question going forward is how often that might happen.

Barcelona’s qualy cliche remains as true as ever

Perhaps it’s the F1 paddock’s sheer familiarly with the place, but no race provokes a cliche quite like the Spanish GP. First of all, there’s the ‘start of the European season’ moniker – which, if you ignore the fact that Canada disrupts the so-called ‘season’ in just a month’s time, is a status Barcelona has held in all but one year since the San Marino GP's demise nearly a decade ago. Interlinked to that is ‘the start of the development race’ to describe the fact that, with the year’s early long-haul, hard slog trips out of the way, teams use the first short-haul event as the venue to bring their first big upgrade packages of the season to.

Come Saturday and you’ll then hear one more hackneyed phrase: ‘the most important qualifying session of the season so far’. But while a tired cliche it may be, it’s nonetheless a completely accurate description given that only twice in the 24 grands prix held at the fast, sweeping and, most crucially of all, overtaking-unfriendly Circuit de Catalunya has the race not been won from the front-row.

After Michael Schumacher brilliantly claimed his maiden Ferrari win from third on the grid in atrocious wet weather in 1996, home hero Fernando Alonso won from – by Barcelona standards – an unthinkable fifth two years ago. The race reverted to type last season as Lewis Hamilton won from pole though, something which has happened on 75 per cent of occasions at this event – the highest ratio of any track on the calendar, according to McLaren. And, yes, that does include Monaco.

While the long run down to the first corner from the grid certainly presents chances to make up for any qualifying mishaps – or, as Alonso showed us en-route to that 2013 victory, all the way down to Turn Four – if early progress isn’t made then the tone of a driver's race can be set from very early on. With a 100 per cent pole record in 2015 behind him coming into this weekend, Hamilton is therefore the man most likely to take advantage of the Barcelona race’s truisms as the world champion aims to become the first man since Schumacher 11 years ago to claim back-to-back Spanish successes.

Can Maldonado and Kvyat deliver?

Every driver is under pressure, of course, but some are under more pressure than others and both Pastor Maldonado and Daniil Kvyat head to Barcelona in urgent need of a convincing performance after deeply disappointing starts to their 2015 campaigns.

Maldonado has yet to score a point this term and patience with the Venezuelan is apparently wearing thin at Lotus.

“I can sense little frustrations coming,” reported Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz in Bahrain after a botched pit-stop saw Pastor tumbled down the field. “I understand it is his fault that he stalled the car and without all that he would have been seventh.”

The question remains, then, how long can Maldonado’s sponsorship dollars keep him on the grid if he isn’t delivering?

If there is one track where Maldonado could be expected to turn things around then it would have to be Barcelona. He achieved his sole F1 victory at the track in 2012 with Williams – to put the achievement into context, the team only finished in the top five on one other occasion that year – and he was also on pole there for the GP2 opener in 2008. With Maldonado being whitewashed at Lotus in the head-to-head by Romain Grosjean and GP2 champion Jolyon Palmer waiting in the wings, how long can the sponsorship compensate for the lost points and accident damage?

For Red Bull's Kvyat the vultures are already hovering with Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen impressing at Toro Rosso. A notoriously slow starter, the Russian is already in danger of appearing to have been thrust into the senior team too soon and his Bahrain weekend was littered with errors.

With Helmut Marko’s driver programme not one for sentiment, the Russian needs to start impressing fast.