Trackside view from Jerez

Kimi Raikkonen was trying. That much was clear, and not just from the timesheets. In testing, what matters far more than the laptimes is the attitude of the car on track, those glimpses of the potential of what is to come. On that evidence, regardless of how good the Lotus E20 goes on to become, Raikkonen has set out his stall to attack.

On the first day of pre-season testing, the Formula 1 cars are no more than prototype grand prix machines. They are infants on their first day at nursery rather than fully mature graduates, and they must be treated as such. Drawing conclusions from what we saw on Tuesday at Jerez would be tantamount to judging a grown man as the boy he once was. This is not just any prologue, it is the first paragraph of the prologue to the 2012 F1 season.

Even the teams themselves, with their gigabytes of data, will have no clear picture of where they stand beyond the vaguest of impressions of what these cars might become as they advance into adolescence during the test days that follow over the next month.

The final corner at Jerez is a second-gear left-hander named Curva Ducados. It's not one of Jerez's faster turns, but it is a long, challenging corner with a little banking from which a quick exit is vital. Standing on the inside of the corner, you have a clear view of the approach, the braking zone, the apex and the exit. It's a good place to get an impression of the cars loaded up under braking as the drivers try to force the front of the car towards the apex while the rear is being destabilised and then get onto the throttle to hit the start/finish straight.

During the first half of the day, few drivers noticeably lean on the car. Raikkonen, the day's pacesetter in the Lotus, was the first to start to explore the fringes of the limit. The car looked very usable and he didn't often get caught out as he banged down through the gears, the rear of the car alive and dancing as he turned into the apex, giving him the potential for some useful rotation of the rear without forcing any major, corner-compromising corrections.

For a car on its first serious day of running, it looked well-poised and subservient to its driver's commands. There's more to come from the car, no question, not least because his best lap was set on medium compound rubber, but if nothing else it looked like a tidy car with a baseline setup not suffering from any vices, even if Raikkonen's maximum attack approach perhaps flattered it on the timesheets.

The Force India looked similar. Ultra-stable at the rear in the hands of Paul di Resta, it didn't appear to have quite the same traction at the rear as he fed the power back in to head onto the start/finish straight. Once again, this looked like a car that the team could work with. Inevitably, whether either machine will have the outright speed is an unanswerable question, but they certainly looked drivable.

But the Lotus and Force India machines are mere pretenders. What of the big three? Ferrari looked to have a difficult day, although that's probably what you would expect of a car that is such a dramatic diversion from its previous machine. While the likes of Raikkonen and di Resta were happy attacking, the rear of the Ferrari didn't appear to give Felipe Massa quite the same confidence on turn-in. There is clearly a lot of work to do on the setup of this car, which is perhaps no surprise and things will certainly improve.

During the final half-hour of the day, Jenson Button ventured onto the track with Mark Webber in the Red Bull taking up position behind them. Supervised by team principal Christian Horner, team manager Jonathan Wheatley and chief designer Rob Marshall - also watching from the inside of the last corner - Webber spent a number of laps sitting behind Button, getting a very good view of the capabilities of the silver machine. He clearly had a speed advantage too and was able to be massively committed under braking with the rear of the car showing no signs of even a wobble. So plenty more to come there.

But throughout the day there were reminders that this was early days. Two ghosts of 2011, the HRT F111 and the Mercedes MPG W02 were also lapping, largely to get a grip on the latest Pirelli F1 rubber. Certainly, the way that Pedro de la Rosa attacked the final corner on the brakes, while not exactly looking stable, did not appear to be as far off a Red Bull or a McLaren as you would expect. It was a similar story with the Mercedes, where Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher looked absolutely planted as they banged down through the gears and applied the left-hand lock, the rear of the car not even squirming.

That's not to say that the new cars are bad, merely that they are, indeed, new. There's a long way to go before they mature and while the fundamental characteristics that will likely dictate the winners and losers of 2012 have already been created, those observing - the teams included - can divine nothing unobscured by the white noise of the early days of testing.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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