What a grand prix weekend that was. It just goes to show you what a decent circuit can do for racing. Boy, can Spa do it for racing. It also clearly does it for Kimi Räikkönen, who is always mesmerising in this most inspirational of settings.

Räikkönen confuses people a lot of the time with his apparent indifference. Often he simply does not seem to be bothered. But he always goes well at Spa. Indeed, he is the only current driver to have won there. His record includes a remarkable fight to the front from 10th on the grid in what was an otherwise barren 2004 season for him.

There are some parallels between that victory and this year’s one. Like McLaren in 2004, this year Ferrari began the season with uncompetitive machinery, but have developed the car into a winner for Belgium. This victory ends a 25 race drought for Räikkönen; the 2004 victory ended an even longer one.

In a lot of ways, Räikkönen’s victory was among the least surprising things to happen during an extraordinary weekend. The Finn usually gives a good performance in Belgium, but despite winning the race he was overshadowed by Giancarlo Fisichella, a man who would have been sacked at the end of last year if I had any say in such matters.

Question marks remain over a victory margin which perhaps ought to have been longer than one second. Then some say he wouldn’t have won were it not for kers — this is probably true. Others say that he gained an advantage by running wide and taking the run-off at La Source on lap 1.

However, David Coulthard says that Räikkönen will have gained no advantage from running wide, a fact which is apparently corroborated by the fact that Button took a similar line and lost places. It’s more likely that Räikkönen gained those spots by deploying his kers, the exit of La Source being the ideal spot to unleash that kers energy on lap 1 rather than the start itself. See Axis of Oversteer for a good debate on this matter.

Even so, the plaudits are going to Giancarlo Fisichella for his stunning drive to second place in the Force India. Is it a coincidence that he should up his game so much when there is a sniff of getting a Ferrari drive? I don’t think I have ever been so impressed by Fisichella, who I have always seen as a mid-grid sort of guy who only just about deserves his continued presence in F1.

Some of the upsurge can be put down to the car, which the team also expects to do well at Monza. In the sister Force India car, Adrian Sutil looked especially good through Raidillon, giving him an enormous advantage through the Kemmel straight, capitalising too on the grunt of the Mercedes engine, no doubt the best in F1. This led to him making a few impressive overtaking manoeuvres, though sadly for him it came to nothing and ended up in 11th.

Force India weren’t the only backmarkers to rise in Spa though. BMW, for the first time since Australia, looked quick. Both drivers scored points, and indeed Kubica did well to finish fourth despite picking up a substantial amount of damage in the lap 1 mêlée at Les Combes.

Lap 1 was an eventful lap all round, with Fernando Alonso’s race effectively ending at the start. But we were not to find that out until his first pitstop, when the Renault mechanics were unable to satisfactorily change his left front tyre. Renault didn’t want another controversy involving badly fitted wheels, so he toured into the pits to retire. A clever replay from FOM revealed that Alonso’s wheel was actually damaged in a turn 1 collision with Sutil at the start.

It is yet more bad luck for Alonso. Renault will not like the fact that in the Constructors’ Championship they are now behind BMW, a team which has been lamentably poor for most of the season. With the announcement that the FIA is investigating the unusual circumstances behind their victory in the Singapore Grand Prix, all-in-all it’s been a pretty torrid time for Renault. The move to the red car cannot come too soon for Alonso.

As for the sharp end of the championship, yet again three of the major Championship contenders failed to score a good result. This time, Vettel was the only one of the four challengers to have a good race. This makes Red Bull’s decision over whether it should start favouring one driver over the other yet trickier. Vettel now leads Webber in the Championship. But he still faces a massive 19 point deficit with only five races remaining.

Vettel actually had a strong race. In his analysis of the race, rubbergoat reveals that, when you consider competitive laps only, Vettel had the fastest average lap time of all the drivers. But he was hindered in the vital first stint due to being heavy on fuel.

Jenson Button had a DNF as he crashed out in that Les Combes pile-up. It is his first DNF of the season, making his sixth bad race in a row. Yet again, he has gotten away with it relatively unscathed. Another disastrous race, another two point dent in his lead which remains at 16 points. His main challenger is Rubens Barrichello who, with all due respect to the Brazilian, is not the most threatening of his three main challengers — not least because he is in the same team.

This has been a most strange season. Jenson Button couldn’t stop winning in the first half of the season. Now he can do nothing to help himself win. But his Championship chances remain high because the last six races have had six different winners. In stark contrast to the early Brawn dominance, you just don’t know who is going to be strong at a race and I would be a mug if I tried to predict what would happen in Monza. I daren’t even predict which car this week’s second placed man will be driving — I don’t want a wrap on the knuckles like Ian Phillips!

This year’s European Grand Prix was not the best race we’ve seen so far this year — but at least it wasn’t the utter snoozer we had last year. There are at least a few interesting talking points.

First, of course, is the performance of Rubens Barrichello, which was truly masterful. For once, the most experienced driver in the history of F1 has shown that the statistic doesn’t just mean he’s old — it means he can do the business as well. It is his first win for five years, and who would begrudge him this one?

Brawn were forced to spend Friday experimenting with set-up in an attempt to get to the issues that have prevented them from being competitive since Turkey. Despite this, Barrichello put all the car’s troubles behind him and didn’t seem to put a foot wrong all weekend.

I heard someone say that an emotional Rubens is a quick Rubens. It appears as though Felipe Massa’s injury has had some kind of impact on Barrichello’s form, not least because Massa has apparently been giving Barrichello tips on which lines to take in Valencia.

Certainly, not all of the performance can be put down to an improvement in the car because Jenson Button was thoroughly outclassed. In fairness, Button’s race was immediately compromised by a disastrous first lap — fatal on a circuit like Valencia. Even so, the Championship leader was strangely off the pace compared with Barrichello.

Barrichello even seemed to have the upper hand before the race started, as he was heavy on fuel and could pit later. It was marginal though, and it took until the third stint for the advantage to finally be realised.

There is a slight debate over whether McLaren’s bungled pit stop handed Barrichello the lead on a plate, though most agree that Barrichello would have ended up ahead anyway. Who knows how he would have coped under pressure from Hamilton though if that pacey McLaren was closer to him.

Hamilton and McLaren must count this as a lost victory, not a good second place. After the race, Hamilton’s words said he wasn’t disappointed or upset about the team’s mistake. But for me, his tone of voice said it all. This wasn’t the relaxed and happy Hamilton that we saw after the race in Hungary, and I detected more than a bit of tension in his voice in the post-race interviews.

I think Hamilton thought he had the race in the bag. I remarked at one point during the first stint that it sounded like he was taking it easy. Soon afterwards, Martin Brundle said that Hamilton was nowhere near his limit. For much of his first stint he was lapping in the high 1:39s or low 1:40s. In both his second and third stints he ended up consistently lapping rather faster, in the mid 1:39s.

It’s strange, because Hamilton has traditionally been criticised for not being conservative enough. But this is one instance where I think if he had pushed harder he would have won. His lead was indeed fairly comfortable during the first stint, but I feel he could have pressed home his advantage further.

Kimi Räikkönen scored his second consecutive podium in a row, and it was another relatively bland yet quick performance. He was barely on the television and there was apparently nothing interesting about his race, apart from the fact that he finished third.

This is interesting bearing in mind all the silly season issues, particularly while a question mark remains over the future competitiveness of Felipe Massa. People constantly say they struggle to understand Räikkönen, and many speculated about how he’d react to having Michael Schumacher as a team mate. On the current evidence, you have to say that he appears to have reacted rather well to no longer having Massa as a team mate. Räikkönen’s oft-predicted move to rallying in 2010 seems less likely now.

Fernando Alonso was another one who had a relatively uneventful race. But he and the Spanish fans will take the three points over the lap one retirement he suffered last year in Valencia. Alonso still does what I expect him to do in mediocre machinery, but is not yet showing enough of his double World Champion class which we saw last year.

BMW Sauber will be relatively pleased with how their weekend unfolded. The upgrade seems to have worked, with the team having its best qualifying of the season and Robert Kubica scoring a point. They are no longer the underachieving tail-enders, though you would still expect more.

As for the other big-name underachievers, Toyota, they are scratching their head over the fact that they were actually quite quick during the race, but were neutered by a poor qualifying performance. This year’s Toyota has always been bad round twisty places (such as Monaco and sector three at Barcelona), but despite its supposed “street circuit” status, Valencia isn’t actually all that twisty.

True enough, Timo Glock set the fastest lap during the race. Pascal Vasselon says that all of Glock’s laps during the race were fast. Looking at the raw lap times it doesn’t seem that way, but Glock’s slow times in the early part of the race are said to be down to a heavy fuel load. All told, it must be pretty frustrating to be fast, yet finish a dismal 14th, ahead of just the three new drivers.

There is one big team I haven’t yet mentioned. Red Bull — could you get a much more disastrous race? Webber was off the pace all race, never looked like scoring a decent result and ended up finishing behind a BMW. Meanwhile, Vettel’s brand new Renault engine rasped its way into an escape road just a day after another one spewed all over half the circuit. That’s not good for Renault’s engine department, but more on that in a future article.

Vettel wondered aloud if he is a “killer” of his engines in his post-race interviews. He has now used up seven of his eight engines, and with Spa and Monza coming up he is almost certain to take a grid penalty at some point in the next few races. If his Championship chances weren’t severely dented already, this near-certain penalty surely hammers a sturdy nail into the coffin.

Red Bull’s capitulation this weekend means that yet again Jenson Button has got away with a dire weekend virtually unscathed. Despite only finishing 7th, his Championship lead decreased by just half a point. Yet again, Button looks as likely as ever to become World Champion despite not having any good results. In Turkey his lead was 26 points. But after four dire races, his lead has only been cut by less than a third of that amount.

Since his last win four races ago, there have been four different winners. The lack of any real challenger gives Button breathing space. And for the first time in a while, Barrichello has moved up into second place in the Championship, hammering home the fact that Red Bull have not quite done enough to prove they can win the Championship.

But Spa will be a very different race, and conventional wisdom suggests that it will suit Red Bull. But do they have enough in the tank? Webber needs to overcome a substantial 20.5 point deficit to Button.

10. Kimi Räikkönen

Increasingly, Kimi Räikkönen comes across as a disinterested Formula 1 driver. Any sense that last year may have been a blip has faded further. In Räikkönen’s favour, it is clear that his Ferrari car is probably one of the worst he has driven in years. But once again he is being outclassed by Felipe Massa.

His season has not been without its highlights. Räikkönen was the first to score a point for Ferrari in Bahrain, and has produced Ferrari’s one and only podium, in Monaco, after almost grabbing pole with an awesome lap in qualifying. But Massa has strung together a more impressive and consistent run of results.

9. Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton is having a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde year. He began the season putting in some very impressive performances in a car that patently wasn’t up to the job. So he was battling for 3rd in Australia, and grabbed a superb 4th in Bahrain. But he has also made a couple of catastrophic errors, most notably during qualifying at Monaco. The team felt they had a good chance of getting a good result, but Hamilton binned the car during qualifying and lined up last on the grid.

Interestingly, at the start of the year Hamilton came across as frustrated and terse during interviews, yet he was putting in good performances. Today he is more relaxed, but his performances are sloppier (witness his mistakes at Silverstone). I wonder if he has given up trying. Not the spirit you like to see as a fan. This is a learning year for Hamilton, and I’m sure he’ll emerge at the other end as a much more complete driver, but a lot depends on his attitude from now on.

8. Jarno Trulli

Trulli has had a decent season. As the Toyota’s performance has dropped off, his race results have not dropped off as much as Glock’s have. His qualifying performances are as great as always, and he has grabbed another pole position in Bahrain this year. But unusually, his race performances seem to be holding up quite well.

In fact, this year Trulli’s Achilles’ heel seems to be his starts. His starts at Silverstone and Spain were particularly sluggish. Beyond that, it’s difficult to find any real fault in Trulli’s performances this year so far.

7. Fernando Alonso

I find it difficult to say much about Fernando Alonso this year. I have not noticed him an awful lot, and nothing about his results sticks out. He is doing exactly what you expect him to, which for most drivers is great. But I expect something more from Alonso.

Clearly, his car is not good. But at the start of last year his car was not very good either. In fairness, this time last year I felt disappointed with Alonso too. Then I placed him 8th. Let’s see what he can do in the second half of this season.

6. Felipe Massa

Massa is having a fairly solid season. The only real goof he has made is a bit of a ragged performance in qualifying at Monaco, which he rectified for the race by finishing 4th.

Apart from that, he has produced the obligatory good performance at Turkey, and he put last year’s Silverstone nightmare behind him to finish 4th. He also came very close to scoring a great result at China before his car broke down. He was thwarted in Spain by a fuel problem that was no fault of his own.

5. Nico Rosberg

This year I think Nico Rosberg is doing the business. At last! In general, I have been disappointed at the way Rosberg’s career has unfolded. But this year you have to say that his performances are very consistent, and he is regularly scoring respectable amounts of points.

The jury is out on whether the Williams is a good car or not. My impression is that, despite the glory-runs in practice sessions, the Williams is not up to scratch and is very firmly a midfield car. Just have a look at what Nakajima is doing. The gap between the Williams drivers in the Drivers’ Championship (7th to 20th) is larger than any other team mate battle, even Alonso versus Piquet. In this respect, you have to applaud Nico Rosberg this year.

4. Rubens Barrichello

It’s Lazarus! Just five months ago it seemed as though Barrichello was never going to race in F1 again. Now look at him — 2nd in the World Drivers’ Championship. In truth, though, the superiority of the Brawn car flatters Barrichello.

For the most part this season, Barrichello’s driving has been a bit sloppy, and he now looks past his best. This reminds me a lot of David Coulthard’s season last year. Take his crash-tastic Australian Grand Prix, or his lacklustre performance in Turkey.

One thing that Barrichello has going for him is that he seems to be driving the way Brawn’s weekend unfolds as a team. We hear about how Button makes heavy use of Barrichello’s set-up data, and you get the sense that it has saved the Brit’s skin a few times this year.

3. Mark Webber

After years of unfulfilled promise, Mark Webber finally has a car that allows him to deliver the goods. And his performances so far are not too bad. Webber’s experience has been put to good use, and his superior racecraft has allowed him to gazump Vettel on the occasions when the German has got bogged down behind another car.

But there is a major question mark over his qualifying performances. Sebastian Vettel has outqualified him in every race so far. And that first win still eludes him. He will be hoping to change that in the second half of the season. He’s got to if he wants to challenge for the Championship. This could be the best opportunity of his career.

2. Sebastian Vettel

I don’t think many can have expected Vettel to be challenging for the Championship so early on in his career. Most will have expected him to make a move to a bigger team before being in that position. But given a surprisingly good Red Bull car, Vettel already faces his big opportunity.

So far, it is clear that he is not a complete driver. Probably not ready to win the World Championship. His qualifying performances are usually great, but he is still variable during races. Both of his wins this season have come from pole position, and he threw another opportunity away in Turkey with a disastrous first-lap mistake. And there is also now a major question mark over his ability to overtake, having got bogged down behind Hamilton in Bahrain, Massa in Spain and Button in Turkey.

1. Jenson Button

What can you say? Button has been an absolute revelation this season. I was disappointed after a dodgy 2008 from him, and he didn’t look like he had much to look forward to. Now, with a good car in his hands, the question has been: can he step up to the plate? And you have to conclude that he has.

Six wins out of eight races says it all, and Button has found himself in the odd position of being compared with names like Jim Clark and Michael Schumacher. Even Ross Brawn himself has said he is seeing similarities between Button and Schumacher.

It’s no accident, and it’s not just because he’s driving the best car. For one thing, he is easily outclassing Rubens Barrichello. But more than that, Button is now more focussed and is working harder. He has genuinely become a better driver in these circumstances. It might make him, in his words, “a right boring bastard”. But it will almost certainly win him the World Championship, and rightly so.

I always find it such a shame that the most famous race on the Formula 1 calendar is also often one of the most boring. This is the nature of the twisty streets of Monte Carlo, where overtaking is a rarity. It is the place where people say, “If they thought of holding the first race today, they’d laugh at you.” You sense that they have been saying that ever since the second race was held in 1930.

Still, nothing beats the spectacle of watching beautiful grand prix machines charge their way through this picturesque but intimidating circuit. It makes for a great practice or qualifying session, albeit often not a great race.

A Monaco with rain is always great fun. But it was bone dry last weekend which meant that we had to make do with a procession. Not only that, but the magic dust is fast fading away from the fairytale Brawn story and for the sake of the championship we must all hope that a major contender emerges.

Looking first at Brawn though, far from losing their advantage, they only seem to be increasing it. The cars gained a reputation for their sluggish starts after the first few races. But Rubens Barrichello got the jump on Kimi Räikkönen, despite the Ferrari being equipped with kers.

From then on, Brawn were never going to face any real difficulties. Jenson Button’s victory was further eased by the fact that Barrichello (accidentally, but usefully for Button) held up the Ferraris in 3rd and 4th due to his fading super-soft tyres.

Jenson Button was superb. Once again, from absolutely nowhere he pulled an excellent qualifying lap out of the top drawer. I confess that I thought Räikkönen had it in the bag. Button’s lap certainly confused Barrichello.

Hearing the things that Ross Brawn has to say about Jenson Button, it seems as though he is becoming an absolutely top-notch driver in front of our eyes. Stepping up to the plate, the Brit is clearly applying himself far more than he has ever done before. He says he has become “a right boring bastard“, but that is a small price to pay to become the World Champion.

For years, the potential he showed in his first year back in 2000 was not realised. In his tenth year at motorsport’s top level, we are seeing what was merely a good driver become a true great. What a pleasure to watch!

Credit, as always, must also go to the Brawn team and Mercedes. They made history at the Monaco Grand Prix, as it was the first time the same engine had won three races. An amazing statistic.

But who can we turn to in the search for a rival to this stunning team? At the start of the season it looked like it might have been Red Bull. Their Monaco form left a lot to be desired though. Their new diffuser showed little benefit in its first race, though in fairness you wouldn’t expect the new part to be all that advantageous at Monaco.

But the Red Bulls generally lacked the pace required if they want to challenge Brawn at the front. Sebastian Vettel qualified a disappointing 4th on a very low fuel level, and his first stint during the race was nothing short of a disaster. The super-soft tyres were wearing out too quickly in the first part of the race, and for some reason Vettel seemed to struggle in particular, at one point losing a massive 4.5s to Button in just one lap.

In the attempt to make up for lost time, Vettel binned it early on in his second stint. The performance rounds off a hat-trick of highly disappointing races for the hotly-tipped youngster. Vettel remains 3rd in the Championship, but with less than half the number of points that Button has accumulated.

It was again left to Mark Webber to salvage something from the race, finishing 5th. The Circuit de Monaco is a unique circuit, so this could have been a one-off for Red Bull. Surely they can’t rely on wet races to grab all their best results?

If they are not careful, the Prancing Horse will gallop past the Red Bull in the Championship. Ferrari’s performance in Monaco was very strong. The car was quick, the drivers seemed confident (with the exception of a ragged Massa during qualifying) and the reliability issues that have dogged the car were nowhere to be found. Stefano Domenicali was beaming after the race, and they must be confident that they can now rise to the challenge.

You cannot have a more contrasting fortune than that of Toyota. After snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Bahrain, a mere two races later in Monaco they turned up with arguably the slowest car. Such radical changes in fortune do happen when the grid is as tight as it has been for the past couple of years, but John Howett will want to find the cause of the new problem if he wants the team to stay in contention.

It is quite a similar story with BMW. I can scarcely believe how bad their season is turning out to be. The only saving grace was that Toyota were even slower. BMW ran with a special message on the car marking the Mini’s 50th birthday. But their performance was no way to celebrate it, and the only time TV viewers got a good glimpse of the message was when Kubica’s sick car was unceremoniously being wheeled into the garage.

I am reluctant to say that BMW need to return to the drawing board. They turned up in Spain with practically a new car, and if anything it has made the situation worse. What a disaster from the team that sacrificed the 2008 Championship campaign in order to focus on this year.

Finally, congratulations to Giancarlo Fisichella for finishing in 9th place. I am no fan, but his performance in Monaco was stellar. For once, his experience shone through. It is particularly notable in the light of Adrian Sutil’s inability to repeat last year’s charge to the points paying positions.

It’s sad to say, but it’s true. The Spanish Grand Prix is now one of the most important events on the calendar since the emergence of Fernando Alonso. But the circuit that hosts it simply does not produce a good F1 race. I can’t remember the last time there was an exciting Spanish Grand Prix, and 2009 won’t exactly stick in the memory for long either. But while the on-track action left something to be desired, there were still a few interesting aspects of the grand prix, and there are a few talking points to be considered.

First of all there is the controversy surrounding the strategy of the two Brawn cars. According to Ross Brawn, Rubens Barrichello’s three-stop strategy was the optimal one. But the driver just couldn’t put in the laps. It’s strange because one of the things that leapt out at me while watching the live timing during the race was the fact that at one point he was lapping around a second faster than anyone else on the circuit.

Jenson Button was always going to be favourite for the win since he grabbed pole position in spectacular fashion on Saturday. But that all changed when Barrichello had an amazing start, and passed his team mate on the outside going into turn 1. Barrichello’s race unravelled during his third stint though, and it became clear that the strategy just wasn’t working for him. I wonder why it was expected to. No-one else opted for a three-stop strategy apart from Kazuki Nakajima way back in 13th place.

There is an excellent analysis of the Brawns’ strategy over at F1 Fanatic.

Putting that aside, you have to applaud Jenson Button for putting in the good lap times when it counted. Brawn were dominant in this race, and this circuit was always expected to suit their car. I sense that Brawn’s advantage will not be so large in Monaco, where I feel Red Bull will have the edge. It is certainly a circuit that Red Bull have tended to do well at in the past.

As for this race, the Red Bull team must have mixed emotions. Mark Webber pulled off the surprise of the race by managing to climb to third largely through pitstop strategy. In the end he was very close to Barrichello at the finish line, so he did a great job.

Sebastian Vettel was more disappointing. For the second race in a row, Vettel’s race has been ruined by being stuck behind a slower car. In Bahrain it was Hamilton, but just for the first stint. His luck worsened further in Spain when he was stuck behind Massa. It transpired that both drivers had identical strategies, so Vettel had no chance to “overtake him in the pitlane”.

Does the fact that this has happened two races in a row raise a question mark over Vettel’s abilities? I certainly find it disappointing that Vettel has been unable to overtake these drivers for two races in a row. It is true that both of these cars were kers-equipped, making it particularly difficult to overtake. But Button managed it in Bahrain. Perhaps Vettel needs to work on this aspect of his racing, and certainly he could do with starting a bit better because in both cases he qualified ahead only to get “kersed” (as Anthony Davidson put it during this weekend’s Chequered Flag podcast) at the start.

It must have been all the more bitter for Sebastian Vettel when it ended up that he was being held up for nothing. Felipe Massa’s fuel rig was seemingly faulty, and he didn’t get enough fuel in his car. The Brazilian had nothing to do but lift off and wait to be overtaken first be Vettel and then by Alonso.

At least Massa was running well in 3rd or 4th for the majority of the race. Räikkönen, hindered by his poor decision to stay in the garage at the end of Q1, never made much progress through the midfield and eventually had to retire with a hydraulics problem. Yet more reliability woes for the Scuderia. I find it difficult to imagine how Ferrari’s season can get worse in any more ways.

Congratulations to Fernando Alonso for driving a good home race and finishing 5th. His fans will be hoping that this is a sign of more to come from the Renault package, and I have no doubt that the team will be able to develop that car well, just as they did last season.

Toyota, who came close to winning in Bahrain, seemed well off the pace in Spain. Jarno Trulli wasn’t helped by his awful start, which left him in the midfield cluster which resulted in him going onto the grass and starting a collision that ended the race of four cars. Timo Glock also got bogged down at the start and never looked close to being that high up the order again.

BMW have improved a little, but not enough. Their car now looks radically different to the one that finished last in Bahrain. Two points for Nick Heidfeld is undoubtedly an improvement. But increasingly BMW’s decision to divert their focus from 2008 seems like the wrong one. Robert Kubica remains pointless.

It’s a similar story for Williams. Although we have become accustomed to seeing them stuck in the lower midfield over the past few years, they appeared to promise a lot during pre-season testing. Nico Rosberg must be disappointed to only be scoring a point in what was actually a pretty good race for him.

McLaren were expected to do badly here, and so it proved to be. Lewis Hamilton finished in 9th. That is not good. For the first few races, Hamilton impressed me with his ability to squeeze good results out of what is undoubtedly a poor car, including a fabulous fourth in Bahrain. He was unable to do that in Spain, and seemed pretty tetchy in the post-race interviews. Heikki Kovalainen retired with gearbox issues. Another one to add to McLaren’s reliability problems, but at least their list is not as long as Ferrari’s.

So another race passes, and Brawn look more dominant than they have done since Australia. But as I say, I have a feeling that Monaco will be a rather different matter, and I look forward to seeing how the teams perform there.