With three races down – is the new points system working if Felipe Massa is leading?

With three races completed, Bahrain, Australia and Malaysia there have been three winners so far, Fernando Alonso, Jenson Button and Sebastien Vettel but it’s Felipe Massa who leads the Championship. It may be by only 2 points but it seems strange that a points system that was designed to give winning races more emphasis is being led by a driver who hasn’t won yet.
The table itself is very close with 9pts covering the first 7 drivers:

1. Felipe Massa
Ferrari
39

2. Fernando Alonso
Ferrari
37

3. Sebastian Vettel
Red Bull Racing
37

4. Jenson Button
McLaren
35

5. Nico Rosberg
Mercedes GP
35

6. Lewis Hamilton
McLaren
31

7. Robert Kubica
Renault
30

Though I doubt this will hold all season it does mean that you can hold onto the people who are winning even if you don’t manage it yourself. I’m sure that Felipe Massa will be wanting to win and justify that position at the top but with all the different people who seem to be in with [...]

Williams, Force India and Sauber

Before the season started the general opinion was that Williams, Force India and Sauber would be contesting those places that the big teams didn’t occupy. With four major teams and ten scoring places that leaves two slot and so it has played out with Vitantonio Liuzzi and Rubens Barrichello scoring points at both the opening races.
The drivers that have scored the points may raise a few eye brows as Adrian Sutil seems to be the driver that most consider number one at Force India and there was the expectation from some that Nico Hulkenberg would show up Rubens Barrichello this year. It seems that F1 experience may count for something when you’re running on the margin of the points and have to take advantage of what’s on offer.
Sauber are still lacking any points and given their pace in the pre-season testing this seems to be somewhat of a shock, it [...]

What happened to the Ferrari’s in Australia?

Ferrari promised from Bahrain that they were going to be one of the cars to beat this season and then they seemed to fade in Australia. How much of this was due to the weather and how much of this was due to Alonso’s first lap spin?And was there anything else at play?
It seems that the Ferrari team are playing it safe this year – they aren’t taking extra risks like coming in for tyres or changing to early – I’m not saying that it was the wrong decision but I think it is why we hardly saw the Ferraris all race apart from Lewis Hamilton’s onboard camera. They had a solid race, they finished 3rd and 4th after all but they had promised much more – it seems odd that they couldn’t pass the Renault of Robert Kubica but then if the paddock is to be believed you need [...]

Virgin hoping that they’ve finally solved their reliability issues

The Virgin team are confident that they have solved the reliability issues that meant that their car hasn’t run for more than 18 laps or so yet. This means that they have addressed the hydraulic problems that they have had since the launch of the car and the transmission problems that they had at Sakhir.
Virgin impressed at Bahrain by qualifying fastest of all the new teams and then disappointed on race day by not managing to make the first set of stops. The hydraulic issues that put out one of their cars out in Bahrain seems the same as the one that they claimed to have solved after the pre-season testing where they had these issues – it seems that the fix didn’t work and they now have a ‘robust’ solution to the problem, let’s hope that’s true.
They also had transmission issues in Bahrain and these would seem separate from [...]