Australian Grand Prix Review

On the other hand, the other Big Cat was showing promising signs. Early on, Mark Webber had already eclipsed the time set by the lamentable R3 at Albert Park last year, and though that wasn't too much of an achievement, it did show that the R4 was a major step forward from last year's disaster. Also, with the Renaults and Jaguars on Michelins, a trend began to emerge. The French rubber immediately looked to be on the pace, but also somewhat worryingly seemed to fade after a single flying lap.

Reduced Friday free practice for everyone else meant that a single one-hour session was all that they had before Friday qualifying. Webber demonstrated that his morning pace had been no fluke, hauling his Jaguar up to 2nd fastest at one stage, before finally ending the session in a sensational 5th. There were blushes at Honda though, with both Jenson Button and Jacques Villeneuve pulling off the track in their BARs, and under the new rules neither were allowed to jump into the spare car for the rest of the session.

At one stage both the Ferraris of Michael Schumacher and in particular Rubens Barrichello were near or at the top of the times, and it appeared as though Maranello was merely carrying over the awesome form of the F2002 into 2003. But in a welcome surprise, the McLarens of Kimi Raikkonen and David Coulthard set scorching times in the last minutes of the session to end up 1-2, showing that Mercedes had indeed caught up the horsepower gap to Ferrari and BMW over the winter.

And so it was onto Friday qualifying, and the first ever one-lap F1 qualifying ever. With Saturday's qualifying now influenced heavily by fuel loads and strategy, Friday times will now be the greatest pointer to the relative pace of the different cars. Being reigning World Champion, Schumacher was the first onto the track to act, as he put it himself, as a "track-sweeper" for the rest of the field. Without a benchmark to chase, and with the track so green, his time was never likely to end up being the fastest of the session.

So it was little surprise that Barrichello was able to eclipse his team-mate's lap, but to do so by over 0.7s was quite remarkable. The Brazilian's raw speed was a feature of the build-up to last year's Australian GP, and throughout his weekend in practice he seemed to be well capable of matching and even trouncing Michael, until it came to the crunch on Saturday and Sunday. Rubens' ultra-fast and ultra-smooth lap on Friday though confirmed that one-lap qualifying may well be extremely suited to his driving style.

But the biggest shock came from the BARs. Despite their limited preparation time, Button secured the 5th fastest time, while Villeneuve's combination of experience and controlled aggression netted him 3rd, in one fell swoop erasing many of the doubts the pundits had about him before the season began. Webber meanwhile suffered a dose of opposite lock on the exit of turn one, and despite being one of the fastest in sector two, he had to make do with 14th after also over-driving in sector three.

In the other Jaguar, Pizzonia ran wide on the exit of the slow turn 15, prompting Jaguar performance co-ordinator Mark Gillan to remark frankly that the car had been good, but the drivers hadn't. Fellow rookie Firman also went wide, but at the notorious turn 14, and in the end the best-performed freshman after first qualifying was Toyota's Cristiano da Matta, whose only experience of Albert Park before Friday was at the wheel of a Toyota Tarago van supplied by new Australian television broadcaster Network Ten!

Yet whereas Firman had been able to get away with his excursion on Friday, the same could not be said for the World Champion on Saturday morning. Not for the first time in Melbourne, Schumacher lost control at 14, spun and tagged the wall with his front-left corner. It was nothing compared to the damage Raikkonen managed to do to his McLaren on the exit of turn 5 though, the first really significant race weekend accident of 2003 destroying the left side of his MP4/17D and stopping the first Saturday session.

That was even more the case after the Saturday shoot-out. Coulthard's conservative lap was good enough for only 11th spot, whilst Raikkonen's hairy moment at turn 12 dropped him to 15th. Michael put one back over Rubens, the Ferraris monopolising the front row by a sizeable margin back to Montoya in 3rd, although the fact that Schumi recorded close to exactly the same time as he did on Friday raised question marks over the fuel loads in the F2002s.

So too did the suspiciously rapid times from Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Nick Heidfeld in the under-performing Saubers, claiming 4th and 7th respectively, with Panis recording Toyota's best grid position yet in 5th, Villeneuve and Button taking 6th and 8th. On the other hand, both Giancarlo Fisichella in 13th in his Jordan, and Webber in 14th, were candid about the fact that their cars had made their runs on heavy tanks. In that respect, the new qualifying rules had certainly succeeded in shaking up the grid order.