Gary Anderson: F1 doom-mongers were wrong

Formula 1 headed to Melbourne fearing a disaster. But as it turned out, the weekend went more or less like any race last year.

Some teams had more problems than others, but we ended up with 15 cars running at the chequered flag (Jules Bianchi's Marussia was still on the track but had lost too much time at the start to be classified).

And of the seven DNFs, Felipe Massa's was unrelated to his car as he was drop-kicked from the track at the first corner by an out-of-control Kamui Kobayashi, whose Caterham had suffered a rear-brake failure.

On Thursday before the race, we had a briefing from FIA race director Charlie Whiting. Some of the media asked him, in all seriousness, what would happen if there were no cars left running! The answer was that they would stop the race. This was how people who are supposed to know were feeling about Formula 1 in 2014.

The other point that he made - in answer to a question from my AUTOSPORT colleague Edd Straw - that was to become more relevant later in the weekend was that there would be no tolerance in either the maximum fuel flow-rate of 100kg/h or the maximum fuel usage for the race of 100kg.

Heading into Friday's and Saturday's practice sessions, everyone was a little apprehensive. Lewis Hamilton was the first to have an issue, on his second lap of the session. It was only a small problem with the calibration of a sensor but, because there is no circuit-perimeter road, the car was not retrievable so he lost a significant amount of running.

Lotus, winner in Melbourne a year ago, had a painful weekend © LAT

The team least ready for the start of the season was Lotus. It was in disarray all weekend and never looked like getting on top of the problems. Kimi Raikkonen won in Melbourne last year for Lotus, but the team couldn't have been further away from doing so again. Pastor Maldonado was actually the only driver not to do a lap in qualifying within the 107 per cent margin.

Lotus is still paying for missing that first test at Jerez and is now in a bit of turmoil - it's going to be very difficult to do anything other than go racing now the season is upon us.

Caterham was probably the least prepared during the weekend - it had very little running during practice.

The team that took everyone by surprise was Red Bull, which had made a miraculous recovery. It had addressed its pre-season testing problems and got up and running in Australia. It wasn't in the shape in which we've seen Red Bull over the past four or five years, but now it's in with a serious shout of winning the 2014 championship. Sister team Toro Rosso seems to have been dragged along as well.

Heading into free practice on Saturday, everyone was saying that the cars would only go out for a couple of installation laps and then park up. This was on the basis that if anything went wrong, the cars are too time-consuming to work on and therefore there was the risk of missing qualifying. But again the doom-and-gloom merchants were proved wrong with everyone running in what was a very good session.

All three parts of qualifying were very exciting. It was as good a session as I have seen in a long time. The changing weather conditions added to this and, in the final shootout in Q3, Hamilton snatched pole position from Aussie hero Daniel Ricciardo, who was in his debut weekend for Red Bull.

I'm not saying it will continue this way, but Ricciardo seemed to have the upper hand on Sebastian Vettel all weekend. If it does continue, it won't take long to rattle the four-times world champion. He was seen to spit the dummy a couple of times over the weekend, rightly so as the problems were down to glitches in the car's electronic mapping. But it shows he can be unsettled and Ricciardo could be the guy to do that.

Magnussen showed his class immediately in wet qualifying © XPB

The conditions and tyre choice kept changing as the qualifying session unfolded. I have to give a pat on the back to Ricciardo, Kevin Magnussen and Daniil Kvyat.

Ricciardo is not a new boy by any means, but he's now in the limelight and it would have been very easy for all three of them to throw it into the hedge at any time. Only Kvyat did, and even so all of them qualified in the top 10.

There were a lot of crossed fingers for the start of the race. Some of the teams had not had enough testing time to do much start practice and Marussia was the main one to suffer.

Max Chilton stalled at the start of the parade lap and then Jules Bianchi at the start proper, triggering a second warm-up lap. Both were pushed into the pits to start behind the Lotus of Romain Grosjean, who had elected to start there after breaking parc ferme to change the set-up.

Vettel complained of no power on the warm-up laps, and at the start Nico Rosberg swept into the lead, with Hamilton falling backwards with an engine problem that reduced his V6 to a V5. Both he and Vettel were in the pits and retired by lap three.

While Rosberg's Mercedes rushed off into the distance, which is what we had expected after pre-season testing, Ricciardo followed along in second with Magnussen third.

The best overtaker of the race was definitely Valtteri Bottas. He was wringing the Williams's neck and got himself up from 15th on the grid, after his five-place penalty for a gearbox change, to sixth.

He then got a little too excited and clipped the wall, breaking the right-rear rim, but got back into the fight for points after the safety car he prompted, and never gave up.

Bottas carves past Kimi Raikkonen © XPB

Bottas is a potential star of the future and was promoted to fifth when Riccardo was excluded from second for infringing the fuel flow rate of 100kg/h.

So how did that happen? Red Bull, and I believe a few other teams in the pitlane, were struggling to get the FIA-supplied fuel-flow meter to match the very sophisticated onboard electronics that control the amount of fuel that's fed through the injectors.

Years and years of research has gone into injector control for all forms of engines, and this has made a significant impact on improving the fuel economy for both racing and road-car engines.

I would have to say that using this as the fuel-flow and fuel-limit control would make more sense as huge resources have been put into its development over many years.

Yes, it's an engine parameter and it would be possible for some form of skullduggery to go on, but if the penalty for cheating is big enough then I doubt if any engine manufacturer would risk it.

So onwards and upwards. Malaysia is just around the corner and, with Rosberg leading the drivers' championship and McLaren the constructors' championship, it's going to be another thriller.

Gary Anderson will answer AUTOSPORT readers' questions again in our latest Ask Gary feature before the Malaysian Grand Prix next week.

If you've got a question for our technical expert about any aspect of F1 or the 2014 season, tweet @autosport with the hashtag #askgaryf1 or leave it in a comment on the AUTOSPORT Facebook page.