In the Mirrors: Monaco GP

What is going on this year? Forget Jenson for the time being, because the cars at the back of the grid are getting more confusing as each race goes by!

Two races ago, Toyota held the front two grid positions, yet at Monaco they qualified in 19th and 20th (excluding Hamilton's penalty). In Australia, Mario Theissen said Kubica could have won had it not been for the incident with Vettel, and now his cars are lucky to get into session two.

And what is wrong with Lewis Hamilton? McLaren seem to have a competitive car for this weekend at a track where he usually excels, and he shoves it in the barriers, eventually starting in 19th place. A lot is changing in Formula One, and while the media focuses on the dominance of Brawn, it is easy to forget the big name teams fighting it out for 14th place...

The biggest surprise for me this weekend was the substantial drop in performance by the Toyota's. How can you fill the front row of the grid at one race, then four weeks later find yourself right at the back?

I know the grid is only separated by roughly 1.5 seconds, but that is a lot of time to lose in just under a month, and they need to get their act together very quickly to avoid this embarrassment happening again.

BMW also seem to have slipped back again, after Nick Heidfeld's promising seventh place at Spain. This is a team that stopped development of their 2008 car early so they could concentrate on their 2009 attempt, so there really should be no excuses for the former Sauber team.

It's also alarming that Robert Kubica still has no points after six races, and this doesn't look like being solved soon.

It was another miserable afternoon for Lewis Hamilton, making very little progress with his aggressive strategy. He claims to be satisfied after his error on Saturday, but he should have at least been close to getting some points, not finishing 12th out of 15.

Despite this, there is some good news towards the back. Sebastien Bourdais and Giancarlo Fisichella can be very happy with their showings, finishing eighth and ninth.

Whilst Force India may have just missed out on a point, getting both cars into session two of qualy shows that they are taking advantage of other teams misfortunes. Vijay Mallya also has the biggest boat, which is something to be proud of.

With Jenson Button winning everything at the moment, it's nice to have some variety at the back. And with the field separated by such a small amount, I'm sure that plenty of teams will find themselves on the back row at some point this season. Turkey is just a fortnight away, so who knows what will happen. Sutil may even got pole.

Just a quick mention for Nelson Piquet. After being taken out of the race by Sebastien Buemi, he said in an interview that it was a silly mistake coming from an inexperienced driver (or something to that effect). Bit rich coming from him, don't you think?