MOTORSPORT: Formula One season preview

A year ago Daniel Ricciardo stunned the nation, and indeed the Formula One world, on his debut with Red Bull Racing at the Australian Grand Prix with a car that, pre-event, seemed likely to be lapped, perhaps two, three or even four times.

As the era of hybrid V6 turbo cars began Ricciardo miraculously qualified on the front row of the grid and even more surprisingly crossed the finish line of the race second, only to be disqualified hours later for a fuel infringement that was no fault of his.

This week he is back at Melbourne’s Albert Park with a Red Bull RB11 that has had a much better pre-season preparation and with the country hoping to see its new sporting superstar on the top step of the podium on Sunday evening.

Ricciardo is not simply being modest when he says he will be fighting to be third this weekend behind the Mercedes cars of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.

That pair were world champion and runner-up last season as Mercedes won 16 of 19 GPs. Ricciardo was the only other winner, with victories in Canada, Hungary and Belgium, comprehensively upstaging his four-time world champion teammate Sebastian Vettel, whose response was to defect to Ferrari.

Despite a severe horsepower disadvantage, Renault-engined Red Bull ended up as the second-best team in last year’s constructors’ world championship.

Mercedes is fully expected to remain dominant this season, but there is no certainty that Red Bull will remain No 2.

Williams was a force reborn last season, using Mercedes engines - although neither Valterri Bottas nor Felipe Massa could break through for a win.

However, Williams is a team functioning brilliantly on a much smaller budget than others at the front end of the field and a return to the winner’s circle could come this season on any day both factory Mercs falter.

Ferrari’s form in the three pre-season tests in Spain suggested the sport’s oldest and most revered outfit will be much more competitive this season after going winless last year.

Even Lotus, which is flying close to the wind financially like Force India and Sauber but has switched from Renault to Mercedes power, may come back into contention for some serious results.

All of which means that Red Bull could find itself having only the fourth or fifth best car and, despite the evidence that Ricciardo is a match for the very best drivers in F1, that is going to make podium finishes, let alone winning races, harder than last year.

And it could mean that somewhere around seventh place might be the best he can do at Albert Park on Sunday if all the Mercedes, Williams and Ferrari cars finish.

Compounding the Red Bull picture is that the team’s design genius, Adrian Newey, arguably the finest engineer in F1 history, is now working only part-time on racing as he dabbles in America’s Cup yacht design.

As was seen with Patrick Head at Williams two decades ago, you don’t get better in F1 when your main technical man is operating at less than 100 per cent.

Newey at least is in Melbourne for this season’s opener.

But, after wishing and hoping for 12 years that Mark Webber would win at home, and Ricciardo’s stunning step up to the big league when promoted from Toro Rosso to Red Bull, Australian fans probably are going to have to wait longer yet for the joy of seeing an Aussie win the Australian GP.

The indications from Renault are that it will be at least mid-season before its power unit starts to make any major inroads on its rivals. That delay is another concern for Ricciardo as this campaign gets underway.

The F1 cars that fans will see at the track from Friday and now on Fox Sports TV - with Ten showing only half the GPs live, although it’s doing the Melbourne event as usual - will look little different other than that the noses are prettier. Or at least not as ugly as last year.

The rule changes are minimal after the major shake-up a year ago. Despite the noises Australian GP chairman Ron Walker and his sidekick Andrew Westacott made in demanding the hybrid cars be made louder they’ll sound just the same as those so many fans detested last season.

One new restriction this year is that teams are limited to four power units per car for the 20 GPs, with grid penalties if they need to use more.

Great things might have been anticipated with Honda coming back to F1 this season in association with McLaren, the team with which it dominated in the late 1980s and early ’90s with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost as its drivers.

But the remarriage has been totally underwhelming and even ugly, with Fernando Alonso - lured back to McLaren, where he had a tumultuous 2007 season, from Ferrari - missing from the start of the season after a testing crash in which he was concussed.

Precisely what happened in that crash remains a mystery, but there have been suggestions of the great Spaniard suffering an electric shock.

While McLaren racing director Eric Boullier insists the chassis and power unit designs are right, the McLaren-Honda MP4-30 did the least mileage - 1751km - other than the absent Manor Marussia in the 12 days of pre-season trials, when it needed to do the most.

The Mercedes team did 6121km and the four teams using Mercedes power a total of 18,378km.

So McLaren may be well off the pace in Melbourne, and has conceded it’s unlikely to be reliable let alone fast until the first of the European GPs in May, but the cars at the front are likely to be as much as 2.5 seconds a lap quicker than last year, simply because of the time the teams have now been working with the hybrids.

The secret to the success of the Mercedes power unit is thought to be that its compressor and its turbocharger are at either end of the engine with the MGU-H - an energy recovery system connected to the turbo - in the middle, making cooling easier and improving efficiency overall.

Renault and Ferrari have put the compressor and turbo next to each other and the MGU-H at the rear of the engine.

Honda has chosen an altogether different approach, with the MGU-H between the compressor and turbo at the rear of the engine and the MGU-K - an advanced kinetic energy recovery unit -- at the front.

Despite the teething troubles, McLaren and Honda are quietly confident they are on the right track with that design -- and the Japanese company has a proud history of getting the technicalities right.

The young Danish driver who inherited second place from Ricciardo in Melbourne last year, Kevin Magnussen, will substitute for Alonso after having been downgraded to reserve driver when McLaren opted to retain Jenson Button.

It will be the debut of Sebastian Vettel at Ferrari after those four straight world titles at Red Bull and then being outshone by Ricciardo.

But if Alonso couldn’t drive Ferrari back to glory in five years, is Vettel any better a chance? Not on the evidence of 2014.

Kimi Raikkonen is enthused about the latest Ferrari, the SF15-T, and new team principal Maurizio Arrivabene claims 'The Iceman' and Vettel are a perfect combination.

Arrivabene says the hugely reshaped Italian team achieved all its objectives in testing but, while confident of bouncing back from the misery of last season, will be content with one or two wins - a far cry from the golden days with Michael Schumacher.

Hamilton is favourite for another world title, which would be his third, while Rosberg figures it’s his turn this time.

And there are clues from inside the Mercedes bunker that its German chiefs want to see him have that turn.

Toro Rosso installing Max Verstappen in one of its cars at just 17 has prompted the  governing Federation Internationale de l’Automobile to introduce a tough new structure under which young drivers will have to prove themselves to gain an F1 superlicence from next year.

Verstappen is the son of Jos, the Dutch veteran of more than 100 GPs and at one time Michael Schumacher’s teammate at what was then the Benetton team, and the teenager’s testing form indicates he’s up to the mark.

His teammate is another rookie, Spaniard Carlos Sainz Junior, 20 and son of 'The Matador', one of rallying’s greats.

Daniil Kyvat, who made his debut at 19 with Toro Rosso in Melbourne last year and scored two world championship points immediately with ninth place after Ricciardo’s disqualification, has been promoted into Red Bull ahead of time because of Vettel’s switch to Ferrari.

Sauber, the Swiss team that somehow didn’t score a point last season, has a rookie, Brazilian Felipe Nasr, while Swede Marcus Ericsson has joined it from the defunct Caterham.

Manor Marussia’s rescue makes it 10 teams. It has a pair of 23-year-olds in its cars, which are last year’s model updated to meet the latest safety rules -- primarily lowering the front bulkhead of the chassis by 5cm -- and completely untried.

One is Brit Will Stevens, a veteran of one GP start, while the other is Spanish rookie Roberto Merhi, who is going to need to find many millions -- whether they be euros, dollars or English pounds -- to hold his place beyond Melbourne.

Waiting in the wings to replace him, if he can get a superlicence, is 21-year-old Brit Jordan King, already with a drive in the GP2 feeder series and whose father Justin, the former head of British retail chain Sainsbury’s, is the team’s new chairman.

In F1, talent alone isn’t always enough. And to win in 2015 even the enormous talent of Daniel Ricciardo may not be enough. It shapes as a Mercedes raffle.