Formula One lands in Barcelona to make its seasonal bow in Europe after the opening three long-haul races and it inevitably takes on a different complexion. The paddock feels more homely, yet less exotic as the teams bring their bespoke motorhome complexes for the first time, and somehow there is a different type and volume of corporate guests to experience the dynamics of the race weekend.

The drivers can all navigate the track with their eyes shut because they test here so often; we saw in Friday practice how they did not even bother going out for the first half an hour.

What many of the teams will be hoping for is that the lap time charts also look different, thanks to their expensive aerodynamic updates. Have they worked the calculated wonders? It often doesn’t turn out that way.

Last week I drove six Formula One cars at Silverstone, representing the six decades of the sport, from a 1958 Maserati 250F to a 2008 Red Bull RB4. It reminded me how much the pace of change has accelerated. The Maserati ran in F1 from 1954 to 1960; the Lotus 49 I drove ran from 1967 to 1971. These days a car will be launched in January, at which point the team says: “It will look nothing like this by the time we get to the first race in Melbourne.” Once in Austra-lia, the team is saying: “We can’t wait until we get our Barcelona aero upgrade.”

There are invariably three major updates of the car through the season and teams build a completely new chassis for the next year. The whole design game has been fast-forwarded and Barcelona is a key freeze-frame moment during that process.

Huge sums of money will have been spent on often tiny, but very significant, changes to the cars for this race, and the feeling and spirit in each team this weekend will be dominated by how successful these updates have turned out to be.

There is a gung-ho feel to some of the comments emanating from the bosses of those midfield or lower teams looking to make progress. Flavio Briatore said that Renault would be up with the victory-challeng-ing BMW. Well, they are ahead on the grid, but let’s see how much fuel they have on board.

At the front of the grid a calm confidence prevails; at the back desperation, with Super Aguri thankful they are even taking part.

If you add up the supposed gains that the teams believe they are going to make from aerodynamics, chassis and tyre usage, it promises a solid reduction in lap time. Yet most often it is only a tenth or two of a second and the cars will still be fighting much the same opposition as before. The sponsors will be adding to the pressure, saying: “We’re spending $25m with you, it’s not been a great start to the season, what are you doing about it?” And the team principal will be saying: “Just wait until we get our new Barcelona package on.”

To an extent, the driver’s perception of the revised car will be dictated by how competitive it is: if you’re near the front, you forgive characteristics and handling traits that would make it a dog if you were near the back. Generally, in contradiction, the drivers will be playing expectations down by saying, “It’s not going to be night-and-day different,” or even worse, “I can’t feel any difference.” Well, today is judgment day, and the stopwatch is the senior judge.

Of all the teams hoping to improve, perhaps the biggest pressure is on McLaren. The nature of this sport means that pressure is transferred directly on to the young shoulders of Lewis Hamilton. He cantered to victory in the opening race and I’m sure that he left Melbourne thinking, “I’m going to blitz the world championship” - only to get a rude awakening in the next two races.

It is difficult enough be a rookie driver, but it is especially difficult being a rookie team leader. You have no experience to draw on, but are constantly giving critical direction on all sorts of minutiae; you don’t even realise you’re doing it sometimes. The team is asking questions that you might not even realise the significance of.

Hamilton may well become a great team leader, but it is a challenge and you can’t buy or fast- track experience - and the role will be adding to the pressure that exists from all the expectation from his sensational debut season last year.

The McLaren drivers have a combined experience of 40 grands prix starts, compared with 213 at Ferrari and 337 at Red Bull, for example. McLaren’s test driver, 37-year-old Pedro De La Rosa, has 72 starts and vast experience.

In Bahrain, Hamilton had the worst grand prix of his short career, with a basic error on the startline and a subsequent “bull in a china shop” approach in attempting to correct his mistake.

Regardless of how all the pressure on Hamilton is manifested, the root of it has been a performance shortfall in his car. The McLaren definitely appears to have been inferior to the Ferrari by a critical few tenths. In free practice here the car lacked grip and balance. The team says it has gone the wrong way on the set-up, while Hamilton says he is “shocked and stunned” to be only fifth on the grid.

His sublime car control thankfully remains a daily pleasure, but Barcelona is not a place where he will be able to manhandle the car around to a great lap time. The corners are too fast and too long to make that possible.

There have been a couple of changes – much of the run-off area of turn one, where Fernando Alonso lost last year’s race in the opening seconds, is now Tarmac instead of gravel and there has been an attempt at stopping the drivers from cutting much of turns seven and eight with higher kerbs and slippery Astroturf. The track remains hugely aerodynamic-ally demanding, so the lap time here comes mostly from the car.

So after his Bahrain debacle, Hamilton needs to press a reset button and concentrate on having a solid weekend, put daylight between himself and teammate Heikki Kovalainen, ahead of the BMWs and Alonso, and at least have the super-fast Ferraris in sight, maybe even splitting them to bring home some solid points.

Then he can start to think about getting his world championship campaign back on course, which would be great for him, his fans and the championship.

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