Formula 1 2012 Preview: Mercedes and Lotus

The 2012 Formula One seasons starts in Melbourne, Australia. This time next week, it will all be over. How are the teams looking ahead of the new season? Here we look at two teams who look like they have well sorted cars.

Mercedes

Can Mercedes go any quicker, or get any closer to Red Bull and McLaren? Last year brought some promise as the team led in China, but they didn't reach the podium all year. For the squad that won the 2009 drivers' and constructors' titles, that's a surprise.

Something has been lost, and the team needs to understand why their car isn't as quick as the top two. Balancing budget and results is important in Formula One. Looking at teams like Force India and Lotus, the perception is that if they had another wedge of millions, then they could make a big step up the grid. So why, with a comfortable budget, are Mercedes apparently falling back?

Having said all that, the W03 car looked good at Barcelona. Easy to take to the limit, it had a precise turn in, and the drivers looked assured and confident behind the wheel. In particular, its high speed direction change looked to be a major positive.

Nico Rosberg has finished seventh in the drivers' standings over the past three years, and he needs to make a breakthrough into the big league.

He's in danger of becoming a bit anonymous. He should be at the top of the list of potential Massa and Webber replacements for 2013, but he doesn't get a mention at all. Sometimes doing a brilliant job isn't enough: a driver needs to get a result at some point.

Michael Schumacher has been back for two years now. Those who said he'd get blown away by the younger drivers that populate the grid have been proved wrong. Those who said he'd be as brilliant as he was in his Ferrari years have also been proved wrong.

So what can we surmise? Schumacher lacks basic speed. He was consistently out-qualified by Rosberg last year and the year before. But his race pace has matched, and often bettered, Rosberg's.

In reality, the two are evenly matched across a weekend. Like the McLaren battle, the inter-team battle at Mercedes is definitely one to keep an eye on, and also like at McLaren, it seems to be getting closer.

Lotus

Lotus (formerly Renault) had a very challenging 2011 season. The loss of Robert Kubica, after he picked up serious injuries in a rally car accident before the season started, was significant. Some felt he was the best driver in the sport.

The team worked well with Michael Schumacher in the early 1990s and ended up winning the driver's championship with him twice. They repeated the process with Fernando Alonso in the early 2000s.

Nurturing a driver, building up his ability, experience and technical knowledge is what this team does best. We'll never know whether the momentum that Kubica would have given the team could have paid off in a similar way to how it did with Schumacher and Alonso.

Lotus tried a unique forward-facing exhaust exit on their 2011 car, the R31. That this solution came from Renault was no surprise. Their depth of engineering talent is deeply impressive.

During the current offseason, they came up with a clever ride height control system that was banned before the car, called the E20, was launched.

This was no doubt a blow for the team, as the pioneer of technical developments inevitably has a head-start over their competitors. Witness how long it took McLaren to get their double diffuser working in 2009, or how Ferrari never got it working that year.

It will have been immensely frustrating for Lotus to lose that advantage, but they certainly have the personnel—and the engineering nous—to find advantages in other areas. They are renowned for their brilliance at developing their car through a season.

Their dip in form at the end of last year can easily be explained away: The team wrote 2011 off because the forward-facing exhaust concept didn't work and was irrelevant for the new-for-2012 exhaust regulations. This should put them in good stead in the early races.

Like Mercedes, the Lotus E20 looks very good. It set some promising times in testing, and the car was visually impressive. On long runs, Grosjean was hugely consistent in the final complex of the lap, hitting the exact apex every time through. Some drivers weren't able to do this, but it suggests the E20 is a car that gives confidence to the driver and allows them to keep it at the edge of the performance envelope.

One of the big talking points of the new season surround Lotus's new driver, Kimi Räikkönen. The Finn has a world championship to his name. He's fast and experienced. And if his break from the sport has fully charged his batteries, you can expect him to be astonishingly quick.

However, if he gets bored of the media and the intrusion that comes with being a Formula One driver, then he could flounder. That would be a shame for Lotus as they need a star driver to work around and focus on.

Their second driver is Romain Grosjean. The GP2 champion made his debut in the Renault in 2009 and sampled the car in free practice in Abu Dhabi and Brazil last year.

As is the trend in Formula One these days, he's a rookie with a lot of experience. How he will go is difficult to say. How good a benchmark Räikkönen will be is debatable because we'll have a similar situation to Nico Rosberg versus Michael Schumacher at Mercedes.

The Lotus teammate rivalry is all about working out which driver, if either, has reached the true potential of the car. That's why the team is missing a star driver like Kubica. With Kubica, there was never any doubt if the car could go quicker.