gatehouse

@isomeri: I really, really hope that Marussia can be reborn as Manor F1. A lot of the old staff have already found new jobs and it will be a colossal effort to get on the grid for Melbourne, but I have all my fingers crossed for them.

It was a big factor in my decision to go with a PS4 instead of an Xbox One, really hope it's good.

I can't remember where I heard it, but apparently none of the current crop of German drivers are anything like as popular as Schumacher was, but Vettel being at Ferrari will help that. Also, the tickets for the Hockenheim race are apparently rather expensive and limited, so a lot of Germans actually go to the Belgian GP instead.

I think Honda were looking at being near the sharp end right from the off and wanted to win at least a race or two this year. The official explanation is that it's just a couple of electrical glitches but that the car is packaged so tightly it takes ages to get to the things going wrong. I wouldn't be too surprised if that's the truth to be honest.

In other news, has anyone else seen that Nissan is going back to Le Mans this year with a front engined and front wheel drive prototype. This kind of boggled my mind this morning when I heard about this and it still sounds utterly mental to try and put over 1000 horse power through the front wheels. I love the variation that has now appeared just within the top class.

Edit - Here's a link and a picture for y'all..

The story of day 2 is the same as day 1. Vettel fastest, Sauber second, Mercedes doing an enormous amount of laps and McLaren doing less than you can count on your fingers and trying to distract everyone by saying that they might indeed paint the car orange before Melbourne. Undoubted highlight though has to be Red Bull having to do most of their running for today without a front wing after Kvyat broke the only one they had.

One thing I've learned from years of pouring over testing times is to never trust a damn thing they say. People run low fuel loads or sandbag at their whim, so I think we'll only know who's really looking to challenge Mercedes this year after FP1 in Melbourne.

I'm going to get all technical here and say that Ferrari aren't helping them in that regard by the car having pull-rod front suspension instead of push-rod like the Mercedes and Red Bull have. Pull-rods make the front end a bit sloppy apparently, so it seems like an odd choice.

@khann: Yeah, they're all the same company, but it's a bit like Audi putting a Skoda badge on their Le Mans car. Thinking about it, the Red Bull has Infiniti logos all over it despite having a Renault engine (Infiniti is a Nissan brand and they're linked at the hip with Renault) so it's not completely mind boggling really.

Ferrari have joined the party now too. Shockingly, they've gone for red this year. No idea why there's an Alfa Romeo logo on the side though...

Is it just me or is are this year's cars a whole lot less sponsored than they were a few years ago? That Sauber only has less than five sponsors on it, the McLaren's got nothing on it's sidpods, the Williams and Mercedes are pretty clean and even the Lotus isn't as busy with names as usual. Not complaining, but it does look odd seeing F1 car with big slabs of solid colour on them.