Form guide: Don't bet against a Red Bull walkover

It might not necessarily be the Red Bull Suzuka walkover pretty much everyone is expecting.

But it probably will be.

The ray of hope for some competition to Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber came in the form of a 13-lap run by Nico Rosberg's Mercedes on Friday afternoon. On the option medium tyre, Rosberg's average was 1m39.0s, while on shorter 'long' runs both Vettel and Webber were in the high 1m39s.

But treat the comparison with caution: a difference of almost one second in the Merc's favour is just too much to be feasible.

The magnitude of that difference has to lie in relative fuel loads: Red Bull was almost certainly running heavier, just as it turned out it was doing in Korea last week. But that still begs the question: how much heavier?

Is the reality that the two cars are somehow evenly matched? Unlikely, given the half-second advantage enjoyed by Red Bull just a few days ago.

Hamilton couldn't keep pace with Vettel on the primes © XPB

Furthermore, Lewis Hamilton suggested that when he was on track with the Red Bull, it didn't give him much grounds for hope.

As Vettel threaded his way through a knot of traffic that included Hamilton, both of them on similar-age prime (hard) tyres, Seb was able to pull away at over two seconds per lap.

The prime is expected to be the favoured tyre on race day in a two-stop strategy and the relative long-run pace on these tyres suggests a more believable pattern, with Vettel and Webber heading the pack separated by two-tenths, then a 1.9-second gap to the closely-matched Ferrari and Mercedes.

Lotus is lagging behind slightly, suffering from having only one car running for most of the afternoon, after Kimi Raikkonen beached himself in the Dunlop corner run-off.

The headline low-fuel times had Vettel and Webber separated by a couple of tenths, but Vettel was compromised by having to do his time on the second flying lap, having lifted off for the spinning Ferrari of Fernando Alonso on the previous lap. Rosberg was third fastest, 0.3s adrift of Vettel's compromised lap.

Alonso had several lurid moments to add to his spin in the Degners © XPB

Keeping the front tyres from wearing away and the rears from becoming too hot is the double challenge around Suzuka's high-speed demands; that and keeping the car out of the unforgiving walls, particularly at Degner 2.

Hamilton was struggling with the former challenge and had a few close calls with the latter. Alonso's wayward Ferrari spun there and Pastor Maldonado and Jules Bianchi crashed there. The Red Bulls had no such problems.

Jenson Button found the McLaren to be around one second away from the ultimate one-lap pace and, as such, can be expected to be fighting for a place in the tail end of Q3 - but that's a tougher prospect than it's been for some time, with recent improvements in the pace of Sauber and, to a lesser extent, Toro Rosso.

Button pointed out that with a cold front on the way track temperatures in qualifying look likely to be much cooler than the 40C of Friday afternoon and that this will change everyone's car balance.

So Friday and Saturday may not tally well - but don't expect much to change at the very front.