Schumi changes his mind

Don't get too excited; he's still going to race (as far as I'm aware anyway). What I'm referring to is his Bahrain expectations.

When he got out of his car on Friday, he looked at the times, realised he was 7th, and said to reporters that

"At the moment we are not perfectly in the position we would like, probably to be competitive enough to win the first races"

With everyone else from the top 4 teams repeating how they are on target and how they couldn't possibly say for sure but yes, they will probably be pretty quick in Bahrain, Ross Brawn couldn't allow his senior driver going around spreading pessimism.

To be honest, I'd tend to agree with Schumi that Mercedes has looked like the least impressive out of the 4 (Ferrari, Red bull and McLaren being the other 3, possibly in that order). There are still changes to come before Bahrain though, and apparently Ross Brawn has got a new diffuser up his sleeve that must be pretty good given that he chose to sacrifice any testing time on it to keep it away from his opponents' eyes.

Schumacher's revised comments on Saturday were along the lines of

"This was just initial feeling, but it looks like maybe we were running more fuel than others yesterday and that's why the time didn't look so good. Looking at the results and the data, it looks very reasonable - not too bad." 

Phew. And then today, he saw Lewis Hamilton topping the time sheets and explained how

"They looked very strong today, no doubt,"

...but...

"But then it depends on who is going to bring what to Bahrain. It's something we'll have to wait for to find out."

Insightful stuff.

The truth is, no driver can provide any interesting information at the moment, as everyone is playing the same game. It's going to be a boring two weeks, with the only F1-related entertainment likely to come from Stefan GP and their quest for a place on the grid. Bring on Bahrain, I say. But just for laughs, who do you think is going to be on pole?