Well here we are a long last at the start of the 2009 Formula One season. It’s nearly 5 months since the last race of the 2008 season where infamously Lewis Hamilton pulled it off on the last but one corner from home.

So it’s going to be more of the same this year isn’t it? Well it would appear not, if preseason testing is anything to base future predictions on, it would appear that McLaren aren’t going to do very well this year, and the team that was on the edge of shutting its doors, (namely Honda), has found its feet in incredible style under the new guise of Brawn GP. The pace of the Brawn car has been absolutely incredible in all of the preseason tests that it attended, (which probably was only about half of those that everyone else attended simply because of the doubt over its continued participation).

As of Friday morning, (27 March 2009), the first two practice sessions have happened and heading the table is… Williams…

So it would appear that this season is likely, at least for the first few races anyway, to be very topsy-turvy, not least because the teams that currently are producing the pace, Williams, Brawn GP and Toyota are all running diffusers that the rest of the teams have objected to. The FIA has already approved these diffusers, and so have the race stewards of the Australian Grand Prix, but the other teams have lodged an appeal that will be heard until after the Bahrain Grand Prix in a couple of weeks. Some would say this is just sour grapes on the part of the other teams, simply because they didn’t design their diffusers in the same manner as those three teams, and I guess this synopsis would be correct. However I must say I do like the quote I saw somewhere on the BBC when someone from the Toyota team was told “your diffuser isn’t in the spirit of F1” and they responded “The Spirit of F1 is the very clever beat the merely clever”. Absolute class!

So what is a diffuser? In essence it’s a big tray under the rear of a Formula One car that slopes upwards, and therefore accelerates the speed of air out from underneath the car, and because of the air acceleration it effectively sucks the car down onto the track creating extra grip.

How is this situation going to be fixed? Well, it’s not going to be until the appeal is heard… up until this is heard these teams are basically going to gain points that could be later taken away from them. However if the appeal is overturned and these diffusers are accepted as the norm in Formula One; it is very likely that during the course of the rest the year that the rest of the teams are going to just copy these designs in order to gain the same advantage. This in itself is bound to create an interesting situation, depending on how quickly other teams can incorporate similar designs, it may mean that the teams that gain all the points at the start of the year may not be the ones that pick up the points towards the end of the year. Hopefully this will create a wide open championship for the greater part of the year.

One interesting point on this though is that I have heard that the Red Bull team cannot redesign their diffuser in the same way because of the way that they have designed their rear suspension. Apparently they are using pull rod suspension rather than the more conventional pushrod suspension, (a form of suspension that hasn’t been used in Formula One for over 20 years). More information on the suspension is available here – http://www.formula1.com/news/technical/2009/0/626.html.

So what is my prediction for the race given that we haven’t even had qualifying yet… well I reckon that there is a good chance that Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello may still do something special with the Brawn car,but definitely do not underestimate Nico Rosberg in the Williams…