THE heat and the dust you expect - this is a desert, after all - but the strength of the wind almost always surprises you in Sakhir, and it was blowing hard from early in the morning, carrying millions of tiny specks of sand and dirt with it. When drivers talk about the dirty side of the track here, they mean it.

Unfortunately for Lewis Hamilton, he had qualified third, so there was no obvious excuse for a start he will not quickly forget. Perhaps he was taking the tongue-in-cheek advice of Martin Brundle on making a good start without driver aids - ‘Take the Granny leaving Tesco’s approach’ - too literally. The McLaren seemed to take forever to get away, and the young Briton was out of the race, the serious race, well before the first corner.

Up ahead, Felipe Massa, who was starting from the grubby side of the track, had jumped Robert Kubica, and was in the clean air he craved. With most people believing he was carrying less fuel than team-mate Kimi Raikkonen - though more than Kubica - the only question now was how much earlier the Brazilian would refuel.

Raikkonen pulled off a nice outside pass on Kubica, and the accepted wisdom was that Massa would have to pull away quickly. When the gap settled down at about four and half seconds, it looked as though he was going to be second at best. Kubica, as expected, was first of the leaders to refuel, but when Raikkonen’s car was next to pull into the pit lane, you could hear the surprise in every voice in the media centre.

Massa’s qualifying lap had clearly been a pearler, the race was now his to lose, and after his personal disasters in Australia and Malaysia, there was never much likelihood of the Brazilian dropping the ball for the third time in as many races.

But if Hamilton’s start proves to have been one of those things that can happen for McLaren, what must have concerned them far more was the pace of the BMWs. It quickly became clear that not only was Heikki Kovalainen failing to make any sort of impression on Kubica and Nick Heidfeld, they were steadily leaving him behind. Hamilton, trying desperately to repair some of the damage done at the start, hit the back of Fernando Alonso’s Renault so hard it was initially difficult not to suspect his former team-mate had brake-tested him - replays subsequently suggested otherwise - but if there was a certain entertainment value in watching Hamilton trying to fight his way back up through the pack thereafter, and often over-driving in the process, there was nothing funny at all as far as any McLaren supporters were concerned about their overall performance in relation to both Ferrari and BMW.

They could not take any comfort in the fact that unlike Ferrari, they had chosen not to test here during pre-season. Nor did BMW. Kovalainen finished 18 seconds behind Heidfeld, in fourth - Hamilton having wrestled his way up to 13th - and that’s the sort of gap which will have many at Woking twitching.

Whether the speculation beforehand that Massa had just three races left to save his career with the Scuderia was true or not, the relief in his voice was palpable. “For sure I had not very easy weeks coming into this race, and of course I had that in the back of my mind,” he said. “I didn’t want to make any mistakes, not push too hard, keep the gap to Kimi manageable and bring the car home, and I managed to do that.”

Ferrari’s dominance, along with a second successive podium for Kubica (and a third in as many races for BMW) piles the pressure on McLaren to get it right in Barcelona in three weeks time. The first European race of the season will see every team introducing new aerodynamic packages on their cars, and given the amount of testing the teams do on the track, all will expect significant improvement. If McLaren are going to keep the German team at bay, let alone close the gap on the Italians, their improvement will have to be very marked.

If it isn’t, the whispers that began within minutes of the final race of last season, that Hamilton might just have blown his best chance of winning the world championship he will ever have, and that had been silenced by his victory in Australia, will soon be heard again.