Setting the scene for the Australian Grand Prix

After six weeks of the testing phoney war, the serious stuff is at last under way... sort of. After six weeks of pre-season testing during which the public utterances of the major players were vague and non-committal, Thursday in the Australian Grand Prix paddock offered much the same thing. There wasn't even the advantage of some pleasant Melbourne weather, with more wind and rain than we saw at any time in Spain.

For the most part, Thursday was about downplaying expectations. The exception was Ferrari, whose drivers started the day at a Shell press conference held at V-Power Caffe Veloce. Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa both tried out the coffee-making machinery as one of those photo-ops that proliferate before the first race of the season. They were doubtless delighted to get their hands on machinery that actually worked after a tough winter in the F2012.

"The button was not too difficult to press and the coffee was fantastic," was Alonso's verdict, but when it came to the team's hopes for the weekend he was a little more cautious. That's not to say that his claim that "we didn't reach our targets but it doesn't mean that we are slower than the other cars," rang true, for few believe that Ferrari will be in the mix for victory. Unless, of course, the Scuderia has been engaged in the most compelling and self-defeating act of sandbagging ever seen in testing.

Drivers routinely give away little in pre-weekend interviews in Australia © LAT

The team that has attracted the most raised eyebrows has been Mercedes. Red Bull and McLaren are hotly-tipped, but Mercedes is shrouded in mystery. Some tip the Silver Arrow as a dark horse for victory and few doubt that Ross Brawn's team has broken clear of the midfield, something that will doubtless have been helped by its innovative 'f-duct' DRS wing being declared legal by the FIA.

Brawn himself, of course, joined in the vast collective expectation-managing exercise, declaring the prospect of race wins this season to be "optimistic". Optimistic it might be, but during the first public test of the Mercedes W03 he claimed that he was always an optimist when it came to his cars, so perhaps that reveals that he has a feeling that this car may just notch up the first victory for a full Mercedes works team since Juan Manuel Fangio won the 1955 Italian Grand Prix.

You can't really blame the teams and drivers for being cautious, though. While all of them will have a picture of the competitive order, they all know that what we saw in testing was, at best, a provisional ranking. Remember last year, when McLaren was all at sea during testing then emerged as Red Bull's closest challenger after producing a new exhaust layout after the final test. There may not be anything so extreme, but it illustrates a point. And that is what worries them. Things can change and even the most optimistic could have something to fear.

This is a particular danger given how close everyone is expecting things to be. Headline laptimes in the Barcelona test were covered by less than a second, triggering all manner of predictions about how tight it will be. Inevitably, the spread from the front to the back of the midfield pack will be extended here once the likes of Red Bull and McLaren stretch their legs, but it will still be very tight. That means the gap between perceived success and failure could be tiny.

"You could be in either position 10 or position 17 very easily," explains Peter Sauber, one of those whose team is firmly in the midfield morass. "Maybe between them there will be only two or three tenths."

Could Ross Brawn's Mercedes squad be the dark horse in 2012? © LAT

Sauber also admitted that this did make him a little nervous, and that's perhaps the best way to characterise the feeling in the paddock. Inevitably, human nature will accentuate the positive and there has not been a harsh reality to bring soaring optimism crashing back down to earth... for a few more hours at least.

Even then, Friday practice will only be the first step. At the end of Friday, they will say, 'we will know more come qualifying'. After qualifying, it will be the race. And after the race, inevitably it will be about seeing how things are on more representative circuits. Then, the major upgrades that many teams will likely throw onto the car in Spain will be the decisive ones.

That's the thing about F1. When Brawn described himself as an optimist, he said that you have to be in F1. And when the reality of on-track performance gives no good reason to be positive, you simply latch onto the next race, upgrade or whatever.

And if all else fails, there's always next season. For some, next season starts now.