With the dramas of the ‘un-eventful’ season opener in Bahrain now yesterdays fish n chips wrapper, we look ahead to the AustralianGP which is now less 6 days away.

Melbourne has traditionally hosted the first round of the season so it will be interesting to see teams turning up to this track and for the first time having a clearer understanding of who the pace setters are heading into the weekend.

Lewis Hamilton has been quoted as saying that “The Red Bull is ridiculously faster than anyone else’s car,”

Downforce in Melbourne is very important with the most important corners being very slow speed yet at the same time there are large sweeping corners on the back straight taken at full throttle.

The reliabilty issues that plauged Sebastian during Bahrain will hopefully not be an issue in Melbourne. Sebastian dropped from a  comfortable lead down to 4th place when a faulty spark plug caused issues for him and greatly reduced power. Sebastian will be using that same engine this weekend in Melbourne, however RedBull have made assurances the issue has been rectified and there is nothing wrong with the engine itself. Having siad that, the Renault engine is still down on power and was 10 km/h slower then the McLarens through the speed trap in Bahrain. With the speeds topping 300km/h at Albert Park, this hopefully won’t become an issue for RedBull.

The majority of the grid believe that the best two cars going into this weekend are the RedBulls of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber.

Mark will be under a lot of pressure to perform infront of his home-crowd. He has not had good luck in past seasons in Melbourne however with the local press already touting 2010 as ‘being his year’ at Albert park, there may be much disapointment if he doesn’t atleast claim a podium this weekend and with such a car beneath him, there should be no excuses not to perform.

The weather in Melbourne is always un-predicatable. We have seen the temperature on the race in recent years vary from the low 20′s (celcius) to the low-mid 40 degree temperatures.

The forecast is for a mixed dry and wet weekend. Possible showers on Saturday for Quali and whilst Sunday will start out fine, strong winds could also bring rain in the late afternoon. Temps will be in the mid-high 20′s on Saturday and it will push into 30 degrees celcius for the Sunday, so not a relatively hot weekend.

Melbourne has a very large Italian community and one of the largest Ferrari fan bases we see at any GP outside of Italy.

Fernando Alonso is who many fans have come to cheer on and the Red and Yellow will be out in force cheering for this man.

Whilst Ferrari may not have the aero package the RedBull have, they do have reliability on their side and in a race like Melbounre which always claims casualaties and is always prone to safety car periods, reliabilty may win the day.

Most of the F1 teams are already in Melbourne, many of the dirvers flew in over this past weekend to adjust to the time-zone differnce and the change in timezone will put them in good stead for the malaysian GP the following weekend.

Albert Park is a street circuit only a few Kilometers from Melbournes CBD. The circuit is just over 5.3km’s in length and the lap record set in 2004 by Michael Schumacher of 1:24.125 still stands.

Michael has been a local crowd favourite at Albert Park ever since he won his first AustralianGP for Ferrari in 2000. There will be a very large legion of  “schumi fans” out to see their man. We don’t expect him to break that lap record however, the MecredesGP team hasn’t had the pace of the Ferrari, RedBull or even the McLarens so far this season.

Lets go for a lap around Albert Park on-board with Michael Schumacher in 2004. This was his pole setting lap: