The first dozen laps were awesome. Overtaking all over the place with the drivers just thinking "meh, bored of you now, see ya!". Thought we were going to be in for a stunning few opening races. Then it got relatively boring later on.
Mercedes are miles and miles ahead at the moment. You have to feel that with the safety car and if they wanted to, they would have lapped every car. I think Vettel would have been a bit closer had he been the one following Rosberg, but Ricciardo had a faultless race. Clearly Ricciardo will be giving Vettel a bit more to think about than we'd (and he'd?) been expecting though. Red Bull will soon close that gap now that the car is (usually) moving.
Button looked like he had the young ones running rings around him early on. By contrast, Magnussen just put his foot down and got on with it. Could be a long season for Button if he doesn't pull his finger out sharpish (of course, he's had a difficult pre-season off the track, but experience should still have given him the edge in the race).
Watching Raikkonen was painful. We know he needs to feel at home with the car (see his Lotus steering complaints), but that was ridiculous. There will only one winner between him and Alonso if that's the mood Kimi is going to be in this season. Apparently the Ferrari's had some niggling issues with their engines, so we'll have to see where they are and if Kimi will be more interested if he gets a car which isn't hobbled.
Speaking of Lotus, they were a phenomenon! It actually looked like an F1 car today, and it nearly even made the end! Very, very worrying if they ran those parts into the ground hoping to finish though - that may well be another couple of power unit components out of their allocation which are already on the pile out the back.
Many thanks to Bottas for providing most of the entertainment. Williams clearly do have a good car, and he probably would have been up with Button or Magnussen had he not split his wheel in two, but then a 4-times champion did exactly the same in qualifying and carried on. Then again, he was so close to also being Kobayashied at the start.
I'm warming to the volume now - they're much better with plenty of cars on track, I think FOM have tweaked the levels and I do like that you can hear lockups and slides in the vicinity. I do worry about the sound levels in the vast swathes of Sepang, Bahrain and the other Tilke parks. Still, I adore the noise itself though. Utterly, utterly love it.