Ralf Schumacher is probably the most deluded driver in Formula 1 today. Before the season began, he claimed that he is among the top three drivers in Formula 1, on a par with Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen.

It has taken us all these weeks to wipe away those tears of laughter, but just as we have recovered he has done it again! Now he claims that the Toyota he drives is the fourth fastest car in Formula 1!

Okay, so Ralf Schumacher is the third-best driver in the fourth-fastest car. So how on earth does he explain his shoddy performances and lacklustre results?

His Australian Grand Prix was not too bad, finishing 8^th. But how does he explain the Malaysian Grand Prix where he finished 15^th, behind the Hondas and mixing it with the Toro Rossos and Super Aguris? Or the Bahrain Grand Prix where he finished 12^th out of fifteen finishers?

Schumi jnr had better stay this deluded if he wants to be among the top three drivers. The only place this will happen is in his dreams.

Unfortunately I was unable to liveblog today’s Bahrain Grand Prix, so I will dump my thoughts on the race here instead. It gives me a good chance to write at length about the events so far this season, as I haven’t written anything about it here yet.

There was a slightly topsy-turvy feel to the whole race weekend really. I guess most people, like me, expected Räikkönen to race Felipe Massa off the park. But in Malaysia and Bahrain, Kimi has looked a little bit half-arsed. Massa grabbed pole on both races, and he was well in control of today’s race.

Räikkönen did beat Massa in Malaysia, after the Brazilian made some typically Massa-esque mistakes — the sort that we had thought we’d seen the last of from him — when he was under pressure from Lewis Hamilton. But apart from that, Kimi’s races this year have been pretty anonymous.

Today’s big “doh” moment was at the restart when Räikkönen was caught fast asleep. He must have done plenty of restarts by now, so he must know the drill. But he obviously wasn’t paying attention. That could have been his chance to take Alonso. As it was, he ended up being stuck behind the McLaren until his first pit stop.

Linksheaven has already asked what a lot of people must be thinking to themselves: Have we over rated Kimi Räikkönen for all these years? Räikkönen is no Kimi Räikkönen, as Linksheaven says.

After all, who have we had to compare him to? Nick Heidfeld — who actually did better than Kimi at Sauber. Then an ageing David Coulthard, who also did better than Kimi. Most recently he has been up against a distinctly average Juan Pablo Montoya. Now he is being made to look plain by the scrappy Massa.

When Räikkönen started Formula 1 in 2001 he was seen as the potential heir to Michael Schumacher’s throne. Since then, he has merely won a handful of races. Some of them have been mighty impressive performances. But a lot of the time he just looks like he isn’t there. In the intervening period there was the small matter of Fernando Alonso, who was able to win back-to-back World Championships while Kimi just rolled his eyes (drowned his sorrows) and blamed his car.

But while we are talking about Alonso, he too was looking distinctly off-colour this weekend. All of the hype currently surrounds his team mate, Lewis Hamilton. Despite the obvious difficulties the McLarens faced in the first two stints, Hamilton made a strong comeback in the third stint, to the point where some wondered if he could actually win the race.

Meanwhile, Alonso languished behind. In the first stint he held up Kimi Räikkönen to a chronic extent. Then, once Räikkönen got past him after the first pit stops, Alonso got overtaken by Heidfeld on the outside. To be fair, it was an astonishing move from Heidfeld — really great, impressive, gutsy driving. But Alonso shouldn’t even have been in a position to be overtaken by a BMW.

Having said that, the BMW is clearly a handy car. In fact, it is undoubtedly the third-best car after the Ferraris and McLarens. Heidfeld has finished 4^th in all of this year’s races so far, which is good going. Today, Kubica finally joined him on the scoring sheet. The jury is still out on Kubica, but Heidfeld has been very impressive this year, especially with today’s overtaking move.

But the best move of the day for me was David Coulthard’s on Giancarlo Fisichella. The Red Bulls had a pretty bad start to the year — the car is unreliable, and it looked as though it didn’t even have the speed to compete for regular points finishes. But today, at last, the speed was there.

Coulthard was doing a fantastic job, particularly considering his grid position of 21^st. DC was on course for a points finish, and his move on Fisichella underlined just how well the Red Bull was performing. It was a similar move to the one that went so disastrously wrong with Wurz in Australia. This time, though, Fisichella let Coulthard by.

It was almost difficult to believe that Coulthard had pulled it off, but he had. And it has to be remembered that the two drivers were using the same Renault engines. So that shows you have far back Renault now find themselves in the chassis department.

Unfortunately for Red Bull, the reliability still eludes them. Coulthard parked in the garage with a hydraulics failure, while Webber — who was also having a brilliant race — also had to pull off due to a mechanical failure. For much of the race the Australian also had to cope with having his fuel flap stuck open. That seems to be an Achilles heel of Red Bull. A strange Achilles heel to have if you ask me.

Toyota are having a funny time. On the one hand, Trulli is clearly able to challenge for a low points score, pretty much on a par with Renault. Meanwhile, Ralf Schumacher struggles in the lower midfield with the Hondas. Honda are supposed to be having a really embarrassing time at the moment. Well Ralf Schumacher must just be one non-stop blush. He reckons he is one of the top three drivers in F1. I think he is a bloody overpaid fool.

It is difficult to analyse Super Aguri. They certainly look as though they are there or thereabouts. Both Davidson and Sato were able to get some impressive positions over the weekend, but those engine problems are a big worry — for both Aguri and Honda? (Although what’s the odds on it being sabotage to minimise the embarrassment caused to the works Honda team? :D)

I think the main lesson from the first three races is that we are going to be in for a really tight championship. There is currently a three-way tie at the top. Alonso, Räikkönen and — amazingly — Hamilton share the lead on 22 points each. Technically though, Hamilton is actually third because he hasn’t won a race whereas Alonso and Räikkönen have.

Is it too much to ask if Hamilton could be the World Champion this year? I know I am getting sucked into the mad hype that is surrounding him. But he has been seriously impressive in these first three races, and he well and truly showed up Alonso today. A race win is surely just around the corner.

Outside of the top three, Massa could also be in with a shout of getting the Drivers’ Championship. Today showed that the supposed “number one” drivers should not take their status for granted. Massa and Hamilton well and truly beat the supposed title protagonists. It really is difficult to know who is going to win a race.

Finally, I have to admit that I was a sceptic of these new tyre rules, where each driver has to use a different compound at least once during the race. I thought it would end up being rubbish, but we have seen how it has the potential to completely turn the race on its head.

The way Hamilton came back in that last stint showed what can happen under these new rules. It adds a certain amount of predictability to races which all too often in the past have felt as though they were over by the first pitstop. Fantastic.

In short, I am mighty excited about this season! Bernie totally bollocksed up the the calendar this year, meaning that we have to wait a whole bloody month until the next race in Spain. It’s going to be a long wait.

Here is how I voted in the F1 Racing magazine awards.

• Pit crew of the year: Ferrari
• Most improved team of the year: BMW Sauber — Undoubtedly the surprise package of the year. In some races — notably at Monza — this was probably the second fastest car!
• Team principal of the year: Flavio Briatore (Renault) — What a colourful character, and what a great job he’s done at Renault over the past four years
• Drive of the year: Kimi Räikkönen, P22 to P3, Bahrain — Kimi is quite good at making his way through the field. This effort at Bahrain was particularly impressive
• Start of the year: Fernando Alonso, P7 to P3, Malaysia — Watch the way Alonso overtakes those two Williams cars into turn one. He makes it look so effortless.
  
• Overtaking manoeuvre of the year: Fernando Alonso on Jenson Button for P1, lap 4 (restart), Australia — On the restart you are not allowed to overtake until you have passed the start / finish line. Alonso times this move perfectly. I remember watching this and enjoying it so much
  
• Car of the year: Renault R26 — Even with the FIA trying its best to ban all of the good bits, the Renault R26 was still the class of the field
• Driver of the year: Fernando Alonso — Michael Schumacher might have been impressive, but it’s difficult to argue against Alonso being the fastest driver in the world currently
• Qualifier of the year: Kimi Räikkönen — In an average car, Kimi has pulled a few impressive laps out of the bag from nowhere, and he’s had more than a few great grid slots
• Rookie of the year: Robert Kubica — Rosberg was impressive to start with, but he completely tailed off. Kubica, on the other hand, had an extremely impressive race to make the podium at the Italian Grand Prix. He made Heidfeld look plain.
• Friday driver of the year: Robert Kubica — I’ve not seen much Friday action of course, but Kubica seemed impressive enough
• Personality of the year: Flavio Briatore
• Technical director of the year: Bob Bell (Renault)
• Man of the year: Fernando Alonso

A special mention, too, for Alonso’s first few laps at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Simply incredible.

Better late than never. Races don’t come much more action-packed than that. It’s just as well the race itself was good fun, because by the looks of it there isn’t going to be much of a championship battle this year. Renault and Alonso look as though they could race their cars backwards and still walk the championship in their sleep.

Just like qualifying, cars were falling of the circuit left, right and centre. Juan Pablo Montoya didn’t even wait for the race to start to go off on a spin. He looked like a bit of a funnyman. Lucky for him that Fisichella stalled and caused there to be a second warm-up lap! Montoya’s retirement in the end was possibly one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. If that had happened to me I would be pissed off, but Montoya in his post-race interview he was joking about it! “Haha, yeah, I had a few spins! Crazy old me, eh?” Fiery guy.

He went off in the same place as Michael Schumacher, and that really was weird. Schumi made several mistakes in the run-up to his retirement. It’s not unusual to see him run a bit wide every once in a while, but he just piled on mistake after mistake. James Allen said he was obviously wound-up big time because he ended up storming into the Toyota garage apparently thinking it was his Ferrari garage! Very odd.

Loads of folk were crashing though. Massa once again proved how much of an idiot he is. He took out Rosberg at the first corner, which is a shame for Rosberg. Klien had a funny accident near the start as well, and Tonio Liuzzi had a strange off after a restart. Must have been a tyre thing — loads of folk were complaining about grip.

Fisichella and Button were both complaining about grip. I think Fisichella is just making excuses though because he magically found a bit of speed when the boss got on the radio to tell him to pull his finger out (after having already been told, live on worldwide television, that he was being two seconds slower than Alonso for no good reason). He lucked into that 5^th place due to Button’s problem, although he was pretty brave to drive straight into Button’s fire and oil. And given that Fisichella had to start the race from the pitlane I guess he has to take a bit of credit for getting that far up the field in the first place.

As for Button’s last-minute engine blow-up, it meant one of the most exciting ends to a race that I can remember. How unlucky must you be for your engine to blow up on the very last corner? Gutting. Button drove a smooth race yet again, but although he can get the odd pole position (and he didn’t seem to be too lightly fuelled) he is seriously lacking in race pace.

Honda’s decision to pull over to avoid getting an engine penalty is a talking point. I would certainly have gone for the points if I could. It’s a bit defensive to sacrifice two, three or maybe even four points for a measely grid penalty isn’t it? Are they really so scared of ten places on the grid? Pat Symmonds says it was the right choice — but he’s with the other team so I don’t know if I believe him! Whatever, if this was really about taking advantage of Button’s and Honda’s strength at Imola, surely this strength would only make the ten place penalty easier to swallow.

As for Alonso and Räikkönen, I am sad that Räikkönen wasn’t able to challenge Alonso more closely. By the end of the race Kimi wasn’t actually that far behind, but all sorts of things were conspiring against him. He had some kind of problem with his front wing which wasn’t a help. But the biggest factor was the restarts — the Midlands allowed Alonso to storm away and have a four second lead at the restart — twice. Alonso doesn’t even need to try with help like that. This really bunched up the field and some of the restarts were insane.

Alonso can take a lot more credit for what happened at the first restart. His overtaking move on Button was perfectly timed and got me very excited. Genius. It is moments like that that make you really appreciate why Alonso is World Champion.

Third place was Ralf Schumacher, and that is a real return to form for Toyota. A surprise after their fairly torrid first couple of races, particularly Bahrain where they really were in amongst the backmarkers. When you consider that Ralf had a drive-through penalty as well, Schumacher Jnr’s race was pretty good.

The BMWs were also fantastic. They look much stronger than I had anticipated, and I’m pleased for Heidfeld especially to get such a good result by finishing fourth. Williams looked like they were the stronger of the two teams in Bahrain, but Williams have some reliability issues that they need to iron out. I’m not a great fan of Mark Webber, but you really have to feel sorry for him to have that failure whilst leading his home grand prix (even although he was yet to pit).

Rubens Barrichello was lucky to finish as high as he did. He undoubtedly benefited from there being so many retirements. Given that he spent so much time being stuck behind Takuma Sato’s Super Aguri, you must wonder about his ability to get to grips with his Honda. To be stuck behind what is effectively a Honda B-team running a four year old car really shouldn’t happen. Whatever the problem with that Honda is — and both Button and Barrichello are complaining — it seems to be hitting Barrichello much harder. He said on the radio that he was struggling like a bitch. Button, on the other hand, seems able to battle on and make the most of what he’s got without getting into a mope.

Another controversial A-team versus B-team moment was with Red Bull and Toro Rosso. The Toro Rosso is controversial because of its V10 engines, and at the start of the season I decided that as long as it was behind the main Red Bull cars then everything was above board. But the Toro Rosso was ahead of the Red Bull on the track. How angry was David Coulthard after the race? Livid. And he took it to the stewards: Scott Speed overtook DC under yellows. Then Speed was given a penalty and lost his 8^th place and first points finish. So he said a sweary word to David Coulthard. Come on lads. Aren’t you both racing on the same side? Do some in the Red Bull team feel threatened by the existence of Toro Rosso?

Okay, a three week break until the next race now so there’s plenty of time to reflect on it all. I’m off to watch the highlights programme — that was a race worth watching three times!

Not a very action-packed race. For a period about two thirds of the way through it looked like it was going to be one of those rare races that actually get closer towards the end, but it was not to be. I didn’t fall asleep though, so I’m becoming expert at surviving these races that are on at funny times.

I think the biggest thing to point out is how confusing qualifying is these days. Qualifying in Bahrain may have been a success, but yesterday’s session was a bit of a shambles. We had Steve Rider and Mark Blundell standing there on ITV’s coverage going on about how Michael Schumacher had been knocked out when he actually hadn’t. You could actually see the moment when Mark Blundell was told through his earpiece that Schumacher was actually still in; his face fell!

But the confusion wasn’t to end there, because there were several engine penalties. I really think this is the most idiotic rule in Formula 1 at the moment. They say that if a car breaks down 50 yards after the finish line then the car has done its job perfectly. Well, not any more. David Coulthard was given an engine penalty after his engine expired after the race. But if it blew before the chequered flag he wouldn’t have got a penalty.

Massa’s engine problems were confusing as well. We were told that he wasn’t even going to take part in qualifying because of his engine penalties. Then he did, but only in stage one — he qualified for stage two but didn’t take part in it. Why? And then there was the issue of Michael Schumacher. ITV and BBCi were both reporting that he would start 10^th because of his engine penalty. I didn’t understand that. Today Martin Brundle said he asked three different Ferrari people and got three different answers — none of which ended up being correct!

Bernie and chums go on about how important it is to entertain fans during qualifying. But what is the point when nobody knows what the grid is actually going to be like until just before the race? Formula1.com has this to say:

The official provisional grid, as released by the FIA on Sunday morning, follows below. Further changes are still possible prior to the race

Ridiculous! They almost may as well determine the grid order by plucking names out of a hat. And the FIA want to have engines lasting for six races! This engine rule is meant to be a cost-cutting exercise, but at this rate everybody will be starting at the “back” of the grid, and just making as many engine changes as they want anyway. And the grid will probably end up be determined by the fastest times.

So here’s a bright idea. Why not just forget the whole engines business — and the race fuel loads while you’re at it — and let’s have the fastest drivers at the front of the grid. What a novel idea!

I can’t help wondering if some teams are actually taking advantage of the engine rules. If you’re starting from the back of the grid you can fuel heavily and have fewer pit stops. This is how the somewhat average Felipe Massa beat his seven-times World Champion team-mate from further back on the grid today. Unusually, Ferrari opted not to swap the drivers around — but it’s only a point, eh? That could come back to bite them!

It doesn’t help that with the new V8s, engines are most teams’ achille’s heel at the moment. The Ferraris seem particularly bad. I know nothing about engines, but that Ferrari engine sounds seriously rough. It cackles away. Sometimes it sounds like Michael Schumacher’s dragging along a tub that’s scraping along the ground. Both Cosworths also blew, which was a particular shame for Nico Rosberg. Nick Heidfeld was also looking good when his BMW went.

Apparently Juan Pablo Montoya’s engine wasn’t in too great nick either. That’s just as well recently, because he was looking seriously mediocre. 4^th might be a respectable result, but we’ve seen what Kimi Räikkönen can do with a McLaren and he ends up making the “fiery” Montoya look quite mundane. Sometimes I wonder if Montoya has enough drive. He often seems to settle for finishing fourth or fifth rather than making that effort for a podium finish.

Rubens Barrichello was once again a disappointment. He is used to driving a car that does all the work for him, and he’s finding his new Honda hard work. Meanwhile Button is racking up the points. For the second race in a row Button has said that he could not get anything more out of the car. Clearly the Honda is not quite up there with the very best cars. And looking at the huge gap between Button and Barrichello, maybe Button is better than we thought all along? Apparently no driver who has yet to win has started so many races. That surprises me, but it just goes to show that a win from Button is overdue.

Fisichella was brilliant today though. Alonso’s qualifying fuel mishap may have gifted him the clear winning opportunity, but you don’t win a race from pole by accident. As for Alonso, my favourite moment was his move at the very start of the race. It’s one of those overtaking manoeuvres that looks like it simply should not be possible — an effortless move from nowhere around the outside of the two Williams cars. Brilliant.

Alonso’s already opened up quite a wide gap at the top of the championship standings though. I hope we don’t end up having a Renault-dominated season. The next race is another tough one for the body clock. It’s properly in the middle of the night, not merely early in the morning like today’s race was. Hopefully it will be worth getting up for.