Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso must count themselves fortunate they are approaching the long grind of the season in a joint lead of the world championship. In the scene-setting flyaway events, they were each carrying compromises to their performance.

They have got away with that surprisingly unpunished and are still in perfect positions to mount their championship assaults. They could so easily have been arriving in Barcelona on the back foot in the points table.

At this critical juncture of the world championship, we're waiting for either Raikkonen or Alonso to make a performance break from their team-mate. Which of these guys can be first to put some clear blue water between himself and the chap on the other side of the garage is going to make himself favourite for this year's title.

Given the closeness in performance of the Ferrari and McLaren that's probably all that's going to split them because the sooner this happens, the sooner that driver can stop sharing out points with his team-mate.

Despite the stunning debut races of Lewis Hamilton and the consistently strong pace of Felipe Massa, ultimately Raikkonen and Alonso must emerge as the clear team leaders of their respective outfits. Anything else would be a disaster for them, a serious undermining of their status - especially so given that Hamilton's retainer is believed to be only around 10 per cent of Alonso's, and Massa's just 20 per cent of Raikkonen's.

There are very real grounds for believing that the underlying form behind the surface of the opening races favours the two established stars. Firstly, the switch from Michelins to Bridgestones for each of them must not be under-estimated.

Yes, they are world class F1 drivers and of course they can be immediately fast despite switching to a tyre that behaves very differently - and they have been. But the difference between being merely fast and having a measurable performance advantage over a quick team-mate that hasn't any Michelin techniques to unlearn is significant.

The case for Alonso: he was saying at Malaysia that he'd finally got past the Michelin hangover phase, that at Sepang he was operating at 100 per cent. It looked that way too as he dominated the race with his characteristic relentless speed.

His below par performance a week later in Bahrain was rooted in his lack of confidence in the feel of the hard compound brake material needed for that track. With his style relying more on braking to aid his direction change than team-mate Hamilton's, he was more sensitive to this.

So if we're looking for an underlying pattern, we might say that Melbourne saw the last remnants of his Michelin hangover, Bahrain made him vulnerable to a problem that shouldn't be a general concern and that Malaysia was the only true measure of his potential - and there he dominated. It should also not be forgotten that despite his problems at two of the three races, he has still, on weight-corrected times, outqualified Hamilton 3-0.

The case for Raikkonen: his Michelin hangover was largely cured by the time he began running at Melbourne. He felt his driving during the race in particular was free and uninhibited - a point he drove home to spectacular effect on the way to victory with a one-off lap over a second quicker than anyone else's, just to show how much he had in hand. It was a vintage Raikkonen performance, but we didn't have an uncompromised Massa to compare him to, given that Felipe was making his way through from the back.

At both Malaysia and Bahrain he looked something less than sharp in his racecraft at a couple of critical moments, but they were both races compromised by being stuck behind slower cars. So just as with Alonso we are left with just one race to show the true measure of his potential - and just as with Fernando, he dominated that one race.

The consistent niggling problem for Raikkonen has been the car's change of balance when fitted with new tyres. He does not like the understeer this tends to bring and this has compromised his qualifying - far more than in the races when a more neutral-oversteer balance allows him to express himself fully.

But after the Barcelona tests last week, he seemed in a particularly feisty frame of mind. With critical aero modifications, the Ferrari was finally handling to his taste. The understeer had been banished, even on new tyres, and all of a sudden he had a car that responded to his inputs in just the way he likes. Reading between the lines of Kimi is never easy because there are so few lines - but there definitely seemed to be a message of: 'Okay, now we're cooking. Now we can get started properly. Watch this!'

McLaren is very confident it has found significant chunks of performance too. But for Alonso there are a couple of question marks on the horizon. Hamilton has given him a very hard time to date on tracks he didn't know. We're arriving now at places he's raced on already - and with his confidence surely soaring sky-high. And if there's one track Alonso has not been entirely convincing at in the past, it's his home venue of Barcelona.

He was superb there back in 2003 in keeping the pressure on Schuey's Ferrari. But since then he's been beaten by team-mate Jarno Trulli in '04, was on course to have been beaten by team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella in '05 until Fisi's car began falling part and although Ferdy took his first home victory there last year, in qualifying on weight-corrected time he was slower than Fisi again.

After Spain we go to Monaco and the thought of Hamilton's attacking oversteering style there is one to conjure. After Monaco comes Montreal - the one track requiring as much of the brakes as Bahrain and perhaps therefore a potential problem for Alonso.

Raikkonen has already raced at his bogey circuit - Bahrain. He doesn't have any others. And I still have a sneaking suspicion that an on-form Kimi Raikkonen is something that Massa is not going to be able to deal with. Prediction is a mug's game in F1, but those underlying patterns are surely looking good for Kimi.