Rosberg puts on a Perfect Lap to take Pole

We all came into qualifying knowing that Mercedes don't have pace to fight for pole. The Bahrain Circuit is in direct contrast with the Shanghai International Circuit which hosted the Chinese Grand Prix last week. While the front limited features of the latter suits the Mercedes, the Bahrain International Circuit is rear limited i.e. harder on rear tyres, something Mercedes have always struggled on. But Nico Rosberg put on a perfect lap, extracting every bit of his car to take second pole position of his career and first consecutive pole position for the German team since 1953. He was helped by the fact that Fernando Alonso couldn't improve on his final run and thus could only qualify in 3rd place. 

Sebastian Vettel took 38th pole position of his career in a rain affected qualifying session at Sepang, outpacing the Ferrari duo of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso. Light rain hit the track in the middle of Q2 - the track wasn't wet enough for intermediates nor dry enough to beat earlier times on slicks. This meant that Lotus of Romain Grosjean and Force India of Paul di Resta failed to make into Q3 while the McLarens of Jenson Button and Sergio Perez made into the final part of the session. 

In Q3, Vettel, Massa and Alonso took the right decision of using new sets of intermediates in later part of the session and will occupy the first three positions of the grid. Mercedes duo of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg decided to continue on a single set and could only qualify in 4th and 6th place respectively. The German team looked strong in wet conditions in FP2 and was also strong in dry but a strategy error prevented them from starting the race from the front row. Another man who was disappointed after qualifying was Adrian Sutil. After an impressive comeback in Australia last weekend, the German driver topped the first part of qualifying(which was completely dry) and was hoping to finish in top 5. However, the Force India lacked pace in the wets and he could qualify only in 9th place(8th on the grid after Raikkonen's penalty). We now analyse each team's qualifying performance.

The wait is finally over! The 22 cars will be racing in Melbourne in one week's time. After winter testing proved rather inconclusive thanks to cold and wet conditions, the Australian Grand Prix will give us a definite picture of what we can expect in the first four flyaway races. So here we have all the drivers and top team personnel previewing round 1 of the 2013 Formula 1 season.

Lewis Hamilton set the fastest time(1:23.282) on Day 4 of Barcelona test but it was the man who replaced him at McLaren, Sergio Perez who set the fastest lap of the test session. Perez's laptime of 1:21.848 was just a tenth slower than Hamilton's pole lap in 2012. But in 2012 teams were allowed to use DRS as per their discretion in qualifying, while this year it is limited to the DRS zone. Also, teams deliberately didn't run on qualifying fuel load in order to prevent rivals from getting hint of their actual pace.

Moving away from lap times, Adrian Sutil's return to Formula 1 made headlines this week as the German driver tested the Force India VJM06 on Day 3 of Barcelona test. After a one year absence, his laptime of 1:22.877 was 1 second off Alonso's pace and 7th fastest of the day. 

Teams reported high tyre degradation on the new Pirelli rubber and that they start to lose off pace after just one proper flying lap. However, this was mostly due to cold weather conditions at Barcelona. It is expected that this degradation will ease off during warmer conditions in the main season. Another major story was the controversy regarding Williams and Caterham exhaust designed which were banned by the FIA. More on that in our team by team review.

Here's how the 2013 grid looks after Max Chilton's seat being confirmed at Marussia. 

Just as the title fight between Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso went down the wire in Brazil, Marussia and Caterham were also fighting in Brazil for 10th place in the standings which is worth about $10 million i.e. the team that finishes in 10th place gets $10 million dollars more than the one who finishes in 11th place. While Hulkenberg and Hamilton crashed out fighting for the lead at Senna S, they've were interrupted by Kovalainen and Glock who themselves were fighting, albeit a lap down from the leaders. So, here's the Part 1 of our season review where we review the performance of Caterham, Marussia and HRT.

In the first part of our mid-season review we covered the top runners, in the second part we reviewed the mid-fielders and today in the third party we'll cover the backmarkers - Toro Rosso, Caterham, Marussia and HRT. Out of these, only Toro Rosso has scored points while the other three are yet to open their account. We review their performance.