Because in F1 the first person you have to beat is your team-mate...
Red Bull Racing
Race: Webber
Season: Sebastian Vettel 1 - Mark Webber 2
Not a great start for either Red Bull driver this week, but it's clear that Mark Webber is on the ascendancy. Bringing two different variations of the RB8 to a grand prix is an extreme example of driver choice and you can't help feeling that backing the older version of the exhaust system (as Seb has) is putting money on the wrong horse. At least his version is less prone to going airborne.
McLaren
Race: Button
Season: Jenson Button 2 - Lewis Hamilton 1
Even if Lewis had kept his qualifying position he could still have lost out to Jenson Button in the race, because when it came to overtaking he was spectacularly careful. A bit like Vettel in 2010. Most un-Lewis like. Jenson set about his task with far more attack but his positioning after his final, delayed pit-stop put an end to the Mercedes chase.
Mercedes
Race: Rosberg
Season: Michael Schumacher 2 - Nico Rosberg 1
Schumacher's easily had the better of Rosberg this season, but when it really counted Nico was miles ahead. Interesting that Michael was very keen to know Nico's Q3 qualifying time even before he got back to the pits. Having that degree of interest in your team-mate's performance broadcast to the rest of the world might dissuade him from asking so soon next race.
Rosberg's drive wasn't without incident and it would have been interesting to see how he coped with the pressure of a closing Jenson Button in the latter stages when his tyres must have been heading towards marginal.
Ferrari
Race: Alonso
Season: Fernando Alonso 3 - Felipe Massa 0
It was going so well for Fernando up until the final pit-stop and then his race went backwards. Obviously it didn't help running off track in his attempt to get past Raikkonen because then he got sucked into a spat with Perez. And for those people who still think that the Saubers have a special place in their hearts for Ferrari witness the dicing between Perez and Alonso. The Saubers don't even have a special place in their heart for Saubers so anybody else is fair game. Felipe Massa stayed close enough to Alonso to stay respectable and whereas in 2011 he'd have closed the door on Lewis going into Turn 6 from that far back, this year he decided to take the discretionary line.
Lotus
Race: Grosjean
Season: Kimi Raikkonen 2 - Romain Grosjean 1
Raikkonen provided a great deal of entertainment for us all and the only thing we could do in return was chuckle and splutter 'no, seriously, where's he disappeared to now?' His Lotus managed to concertina the field up so that everybody was DRS-ing (it's a verb now) everybody else down the main street and nobody wanted to attack by driving over the Pirelli sprinkles. To have 12 cars within 10 seconds of each other at the end of a race is unheard of. But the jeopardy of going from P2 to P14 that Kimi endured will strike fear into every team strategist's heart.
Romain Grosjean clearly hasn't been put off by banging wheels with Maldonado in Melbourne, but this time there was a happy ending. Given another couple of laps and he'd have collected fifth place.
Force India
Race: DiResta
Season: Paul DiResta 3 - Nico Hulkenberg 0
With so much action up and down the field we hardly saw the Force Indias in race coverage. Paul di Resta flirted with points positions and was marginally quicker than Nico Hulkenberg, but the 3-0 advantage Paul holds is nothing like the gap between Alonso and Massa.
Sauber
Race: Kobayashi
Season: Kamui Kobayashi 2 - Sergio Perez 1
Kamui bounced back from being 'the other Sauber driver' in Sepang to be a contender in Shanghai. He didn't have such a great start but was mindful not to get involved in a first lap incident with his team-mate. The same could not be said of Perez later in the race who almost put Kobayashi onto the grass in his attempts to block him down the long back straight. Given that kind of action you can understand why his team were yelling "Careful Checo!" down team radio at the last race.
Williams
Race: Senna
Season: Maldonado 1 - Senna 2
Thee races in and we've already got a pattern establishing itself in bash.log. Grosjean and Maldonado - and Senna and Massa. Luckily for Bruno Senna he didn't damage his car when he hit Massa up the gearbox on the opening lap. That would be three contacts in three races, two of them with Felipe. His uncle's name may be printed on the front wing of the Williams, but he's trying very hard to lose it. For the rest of the race he kept his nose, ahem, clean while it was wild man Pastor Maldonado who got involved with whoever was passing by. Clearly the 2012 Williams is both fast and robust, but Senna's getting the most out of it.
Torro Rosso
Race: Vergne
Season: Daniel Ricciardo 1 - Jean-Eric Vergne 2
Starting from the pitlane was no handicap for Jean-Eric in a race where the strategy had more influence on the result than the pedalling.
Caterham
Race: Kovalainen
Season: Vitaly Petrov 2 - Heikki Kovalainen 1
Kovalainen had the edge on Petrov in qualifying, but tends to run more laps and use up more tyres. In the race he was ahead until he hit technical problems.
Marussia
Race: Glock
Season: Timo Glock 3 - Charles Pic 0
'Glock and Pic' sound like a couple of Czechoslovakian puppet characters from some kids' TV series from the1980s. In this race Glock and Pic almost had some fun with Mark Webber when he pitted early and emerged from the pitlane very near them. "Aahhh, poor old Glock and Pic, he went away again."
HRT
Race: de la Rosa
Season: Narain Karthikeyan 1 - Pedro de la Rosa 1
De la Rosa got the better of Karthikeyan who managed to stay well out of the way of Sebastian Vettel. Though if Seb continues qualifying and starting like he did at the weekend they might have the odd wheel-to-wheel to look forward to
Star of the Race
Button 1, Perez 1, Rosberg 1
Overtaking Move of the Race
Raikkonen1, Button 1, Grosjean 1
Dull vs Exciting GPs
Exciting 3 - Dull 0
Did anybody say: "It is what it is"?
No, but Mercedes reserve driver Sam Bird felt very self-conscious in his jeans posing for the victorious Mercedes team photo after the race and made sure he hid them behind Nico's pitboard. There'll be an e.mail from Stuttgart.
Andrew Davies
