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Formula One fizzled back into life last weekend as teams and drivers reconvened in Barcelona for the start of the European middle leg of the 2015 season.
Barcelona held much promise. It is the traditional beginning of the season proper: the teams have had a chance to take stock and start applying upgrades for a host of familiar circuits – and none come better to drivers and engineers than the Circuit de Catalunya.
There is, of course, one side effect: so well-known is the Montmeló circuit that races tend to get a little stale after decades-worth of testing and racing data at the sport’s disposal.
So a thriller it was not, but – to appropriate a phrase – it was the race we had to have.
Up and down the pit lane teams and drivers learnt some hard lessons about just how fierce this critical middle stint of the season is likely to be.
Mercedes dominated the Spanish Grand Prix. Nico Rosberg won effortlessly from pole, and he made it look easy. He was 17 seconds ahead of second-placed Lewis Hamilton and a whopping 45 seconds ahead of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel.
Talk of a Ferrari resurgence appear premature – rather than the pre-Europe break bringing the Italians closer to Mercedes, the gap was exaggerated under the Spanish springtime sun.
But that’s the beauty of the Spanish Grand Prix. As much as it is billed as the opening chapter to all-out development, it equally delivers the rude awakening some teams and drivers need after the whistlestop tour of the so-called flyaway races lulls the paddock into a false sense of safety.
Mercedes, we mustn’t forget, will not be going quietly. The runaway 2014 championship team was never going to concede all of its ground in one off-season.
Similarly, back though Ferrari may be after years of wallowing in mediocrity, back at its best it is not. But so energised by its snatching of one victory – and nearly two – in the first month of racing was Ferrari that it redesigned almost 70 per cent of its car and brought 16 new parts to this race.
Talk about biting off more than you can chew.
The story of brutal reality was much the same in the midfield. Red Bull Racing looked as off the pace as ever and McLaren, despite expecting to score its first points of the season, may as well have not turned up at all, such was its lack of pace.
Red Bull Racing continues to suffer with its Renault engine, which should have surprised no-one considering Renault brought only minor reliability upgrades to Barcelona.
More telling, however, was that both Red Bull cars were comfortably out-qualified by both Toro Rosso drivers from the sister garage.
Other than giving Helmut Marko an opportunity to heap praise on Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen rather than threaten to withdraw Red Bull from all Formula One activities, the result throws the Red Bull–Toro Rosso dynamic into question.
Spain is evidence Red Bull’s problems are more significant than engine unreliability given a team operating with the same power unit and a fraction of the budget is delivering similar results. There is much soul-searching to be done among the men and women of the once-great Milton Keynes squad.
But it is McLaren that will be agonising most ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix on 24 May. After the team’s best qualifying session so far, both cars floundered in the race.
Though brakes problems on Fernando Alonso’s car – originating from one of his visor tear-offs blocking a cooling duct – meant he returned little useful data, Jenson Button reached the chequered flag one deeply unhappy lap down on the leaders.
Worse, the 2009 world champion described the first half of the race “the scariest 30 laps” of his life – his Honda engine’s throttle response was so poorly calibrated that his car was rendered undrivable.
But for all the downcast moods post-Barcelona, teams will take solace in the fact that Barcelona is one of those circuits.
Teams and drivers have been testing here for so long that the car almost drives itself and the driver makes minimal difference. Look no further than qualifying, when almost every team had its two cars line up side-by-side, for evidence of this.
Little foibles in a car’s performance are emphasised tenfold in Catalunya, and gaps are exaggerated fantastically. Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari haven’t converted their winning Malaysian form into a 45-second deficit in the space of a month.
The upside is that Barcelona is unique in this sense – and totally opposite to Monaco, where the driver makes almost all of the difference over the course of one lap.
But Spain is the wake-up call most of Formula One needed. Those who heeded the warnings will be stood in good stead for the rest of the year – but in a time of relentless knee-jerking and rash decision-making, it’s all too tempting to change course for a mirage of quick fixes.
Time will tell which heads kept cool and withstood the acid test of Barcelona.