In the first real competition of the Formula1 season Kimi took first blood, and place in qualifying for the Australian GP, by 0.421 seconds which is pretty massive really. Yes there could be many reasons why his ferrari could go so much faster but it still gives us something quite interesting to think about; namely that Raikkonen appeared to deliver that result with relative ease.

His teammate Massa has been pushing his in the build up, but massa does have certain advantages like having been with the team a while and getting a sneak preview of the car etc. Raikkonen however first drove a Ferrari at the back end of January, and that was last years car anyway. So despite Massa's advantages Raikkonen managed to stay in touch with his teammate and ultimately looked stronger on the day that mattered even without Massa's gearbox failure.

Compare and contrast to McLaren. Both drivers are new to the team, Alonso has been world champion the past two years and Hamilton is 22 and never driven an F1 car competitively before today. So despite Hamilton's talents being fairly obvious many were still surprised at just how close he pushed Alonso; in fact looking like he would out-perform his teammate right up to the final moments of qualifying.

So in comparing the two favourites with their teammates it's probably fair to say that Raikkonen has done a lot better than Alonso. A situation even more noticable when you consider how much McLaren whined to convince Renault to release Alonso from his contract early and be able to drive for McLaren as early as possible. And bizarrely their bullying worked. Interestingly enough, despite their pleas for Alonso to test early for them they don't appear to have ever offered such an opportunity to Raikonnen and Ferrari since they frst got together over one month later.

McLaren not exactly seeming honourable with that move in my opinion. Still, given Raikkonen's superior performance maybe Alonso really needed that extra practise time...