Five themes to watch for in Valencia
Will the heavily revised Red Bull dominate? Is Lotus actually the team to beat? And can the likes of Ferrari, Schumacher and Webber recover? The big questions ahead of Valencia
How good is Red Bull's update?
At face value, the multitude of tweaks and new bits and pieces (Sebastian Vettel, tongue firmly in cheek, would only say it was "more than two") appears to have been worth a chunk of laptime. After a Q2 session where even a lap 0.218 seconds off the pace wasn't enough to get you into the top 10 shoot-out, Vettel then put three tenths of a second between him and fellow front row starter Lewis Hamilton when it mattered.
The same gap then covers the next six cars on the grid, but Vettel wasn't the only one playing down the upgrades on the RB8. Despite the result, Mercedes team boss Ross Brawn described the performance boost as "difficult to quantify", and hinted that it was too early to tell just how much of a difference all the changes had made.
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