Drivers welcome their new world - real racing

New cars from virtually every team; a raft of new regulations more controversial than a week in the chamber of the House of Commons; and a threat by two of the biggest outfits, Williams and McLaren, to take the governing body to arbitration over the way in which the new rules were introduced. Welcome back to Formula One. It is not going to be a quiet season.

It has been a long winter, and the sport has changed. Michael Schumacher will still be in a red Ferrari, and more likely than not a unique sixth world championship will succumb to his blend of driving talent, acumen and technical insight, allied to the excellence of the car beneath him and the team around him. But it will not come as easily as in 2002.

For a start, as we shall see at the first grand prix in Melbourne next weekend, qualifying has not only changed beyond recognition; it will almost be part of the race. Drivers may only run a single flying lap on Friday afternoon. Their times, in reverse order, will determine who goes first during a second qualifying session on Saturday afternoon, when again only one single flying lap is allowed, which will determine the grid.

But there's a catch. Cars will then be impounded until the grid formation lap the following afternoon. You have to run the car as you qualified it – on the same tyres and with the same fuel load. If you run light to go fast in qualifying, you will have to stop very early in the race to refuel.

Why? For a start the governing body, the FIA, wanted to spice up the show. And they wanted to kill off "qualifying" cars. They've done that, all right. Formula One will now be so unpredictable that no one will understand what qualifying really meant until a few laps into the race.

"I can see some of the less financially secure teams taking a gamble and running light in qualifying just to get their cars some publicity by starting at the front of the grid," BMW Williams technical director Patrick Head muses. "Theoretically, I suppose if Minardi's deficit to Ferrari in qualifying last year was three seconds and 10 kg of fuel is worth 0.25-0.40sec a lap, if they elected to run with 20kg of fuel when Michael had, say, 80 in the Ferrari, it could be close..."

And what of the men who have to find a way to win races under these new rules – the drivers? "It's hard to tell, really, what single-lap qualifying will mean," McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen says. "Everybody makes mistakes, and you only get the chance to make one. There will be much different grid positions because there will be such big time differences between the first guy out and the last one. And maybe it will rain. You're going to see more accidents in qualifying, for sure. I'm looking forward to it."

The Williams drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher agree. "It went really good when I did it in IndyCars," says the former. "It's going to be a big challenge. Getting the car right is going to be very critical. I think it's going to make qualifying very interesting, because somebody makes a mistake they're going to end up parked and down the grid, and the level of concentration is going to be really high."

Schumacher says: "We had it in Formula Nippon in 1996 and I enjoyed it very much. It's pretty intense, because a mistake could leave you at the back. It's a difficult situation because as a driver you have to evaluate when you are about to brake for a corner whether you go that last 10 metres, or you brake 10 metres earlier not to make a mistake. I think 16 times this year it will happen that you will make a mistake, but I think that's what we are looking for. If a top driver is somewhere in the middle of the field it will make things more exciting."

The signs are that Ferrari will remain the pacesetter, but Ron Dennis signalled the motivations of McLaren (and Williams) after some harsh self-assessment. "If Ferrari were a 10 last year, we should have been a 9.5 at least. Most of the time we were a seven or an eight, which was simply not good enough. It's painful to admit that, but it's a fact."

Both teams have been working flat out to give the sport what it most needs in 2003: a race.