James Allen's Friday form guide

The eagerly-anticipated 2010 season may have properly burst into life in the Bahrain desert on Friday but that doesn't mean that the pecking order of the grid is yet particularly any easier to read than it was during pre-season testing. But while trying to predict how Saturday's qualifying session will play out remains tough, James Allen says rejuvenated big guns McLaren and Ferrari look impressively quick while the grid's three new squads all clearly have a lot of work to do.It was great to finally get this season, which promises so much, underway today. At 10am I was standing at the pit lane exit waiting for the first cars to go out on track to get the new season started and it was Jarno Trulli's Lotus which was the first car to leave the pits. I spoke to Mike Gascoyne moments before and he said that it is six months to the day since he started working on the Lotus project, and to get a car out and racing in that amount of time is quite incredible. The new teams struggled today, as they are going to for a while. They are playing in the same league as the best of the best and, let's face it, F1 had one of its most competitive seasons last year, with teams like Force India fighting for wins and podiums. The level of technical competence is very high among the established teams. As for today's running and what it tells us about the weekend, it's clear that McLaren are quick, as are Ferrari. Mercedes seem to have boosted their performance with the new parts they have brought to this race, while Red Bull are not where we want to be according to Sebastian Vettel. But that doesn't mean they aren't competitive just that they are not a step ahead, as they were at the end of last season. That is a disappointment and means that the others have done a better job over the winter. This is partly due to the Renault engine, which insiders say is as much as 30 horsepower down on the Mercedes. Mark Webber did few laps this afternoon due to a driveshaft problem. Ferrari focussed on long runs with full tanks and didn't do a hot lap, while Mercedes and McLaren did similar programmes this afternoon which was the faster of the two sessions. Both tried hot laps to start with, on low-ish fuel - probably around 20kg - so not absolute qualifying levels. They then spent the rest of the session on long runs, some five or six seconds slower. The main interest here was that Mercedes' Nico Rosberg was half a second faster than Michael Schumacher, who looked quite tense as he announced that he was a bit rusty on the single-lap run. Rosberg looked like the cat who got the cream. After a day of media activities yesterday, where he was overshadowed by his illustrious team-mate, there was quite a mob of camera crews wanting a piece of him this afternoon. But this is day one of a very long season. Because it is so close between the top teams and because no-one has yet shown their hand with a low fuel special, it is still not clear who will come out on top in qualifying tomorrow. As for the long runs, the teams didn't do as much mileage today as I expected them to. This is because they are concerned about engine supply with only eight engines to be used over 19 Grands Prix, two more than last season. Tyre-wise we have the super soft and the medium here and the engineers I spoke to said that surprisingly there wasn't much to choose between them in terms of pace. We will learn more on Saturday morning.