Webber positive for strong home result

Williams saw an encouraging third and fourth place on the grid in Malaysia evaporate in the race as both Webber and Nico Rosberg retired with mechanical failures.

But on the evidence of the pace shown by the Cosworth-powered FW28 so far this season, Webber believes that the team's only rivals that are probably out of reach at the moment are Renault.

"My prospects for this weekend are pretty solid, I would say," explained Webber on Tuesday at the launch of his charity challenge, to be held in Tasmania later this year. "We have got off to a pretty good start performance wise, but it was just unfortunate that we were not reliable enough in Malaysia to finish the job off there.

"Melbourne being a month later than normal could be potentially cooler than usual, so that could make some difference, but the form card is that Renault are very strong and all the other teams after them are pretty even. There is a lot to be grabbed after them."

Despite his confidence that Williams are in the mix for a decent result, he has drawn short of making any firm predictions about what is achievable this weekend.

"We have got to wait until Friday to see what the performance of the car is," he said. "There is no point predicting what could happen. We are up against some reasonable operators out there. It is a tough event and we have got some reliability issues to get over from the last race.

"I hope I can give the home fans something to cheer about long into the night. But dreaming doesn't get you anywhere in this game - you have got to go out and walk the walk. No-one is interested in a shopping list of excuses about why it is not happening for you. You have got to go and do it."

Webber claims that the biggest challenge Williams face at the moment is in extracting the best performance out of their Bridgestone tyres.

"We need to understand them event-to-event, condition-to-condition," he said. "I think Bridgestone have been stoked with the job we have done for them in terms of our experience with Michelins, and the winter testing was probably harder for us than the races.

"The biggest factor that is that Alex Wurz is able to do the long runs for us on Fridays. We get good information from that in Bahrain and Malaysia, but they were hot races.

"We still have a little bit work to do in understanding the car in slightly cooler conditions, but we have surprised ourselves already and hopefully we can do it again."