F1: 2011 season opener thrills like no other recent season

Think junior go karts: they race within millimetres of each others and bash wheels with abandon. Now elevate that to F1 and Massa and Button and several other pairs were adopting similar tactics.

For sure, some drivers were caught out by the vicious power input from KERS off the line, arriving in the middle of the first corner faster than they expected and running up the rear end of more experienced competitors (Schumacher suffered a puncture and suspension damage which eventually put him out of the race) and Barrichello, dodging cars facing in all directions except backwards ran wide, starting the race badly - only to watch it go downhill from there.

Massa did not dodge in front of Button: that's illegal. But he did dodge every time Button - who had a rotten start and lost two places - got alongside. Squashed, put onto the grass and generally threatened at (almost) every turn for lap after lap, Button got alongside Massa once more only for Massa to dodge right and put Button off the track again. Button used a small piece of track on the wrong side of the kerb to avoid a crash. But that also put him in front of Massa. Button argued his case: that he had been put in the position where he had no alternative but to leave the track, but the stewards disagreed. In the meantime, Alonso - who had been close behind having caught up due to Massa's slow pace - passed Massa. Then both Ferraris stopped for tyres. That meant that, due to intervening cars, Button could not give back the place to Massa without losing many places. A drive through penalty dropped Button to 12th and then he made a stop for tyres. By the end of the race, finishing sixth, he was behind Webber by less than the time spent in the penalty.

But the tactic did Ferrari no good at all: their cars were slow and handled badly.

The final result put four world champions in the top six with Webber and Petrov (third) making up the remainder.

Vettel drove a stunning race to finish first. Although confirmation is awaited, it appears that his spectacular performance may have been aided by an apparently silly move in qualifying. The soft tyres - on which Vettel outclassed everyone - are good for one fast lap then go off. But once they have cooled, they go through another heat cycle and then retain their performance better. Having set an unassailable qualifying time, Vettel went out once more in the dying seconds of qualifying. Whether he used the same set of tyres that he had done his previous lap on or on a new set is not clear but one suspects that he made a run on a new set to "cure" them. Certainly, when he changed to a second set in the race, he did not lose pace.

One of the biggest surprises of the weekend was Team Lotus which failed to make it out of Q1 and performed to a much lower level than expected in the race. They reckon they should be around 3 seconds a lap behind the real front runners: that's not an ambitious target in F1. Poor performance has been blamed on radiators - a surprise after extensive testing in hot climates bearing in mind that Melbourne was cool today. Renault, on the other hand, saw Petrov driving a storm as he held onto third position for most of the race.

Barrichello t-boned Rosberg, putting him out and suffering a drive-through penalty for his trouble.

HRT failed to get to within 107% of the qualifying time in Q1 and were not allowed to start - despite the other teams asking the stewards to allow them to do so. Race speeds - even from Vettel - were generally slower than HRT had done in qualifying, demonstrating that the rule is not as fair as it first appeared. Indeed, the first cars were not lapped until lap 16, showing that 107% is not a valid time limit - for it to be correct, it would be necessary for the first "lapping" to take place within the first 10 laps.

Hamilton compromised his race - but probably not the result - by damaging the undertray of his car in an off-road excursion. Button simply did not get the pace out of his car - but much of the distance between him and Hamilton was attributable to the first third of the race bottled up behind a much slower Massa and then the drive through penalty. Without those, the times suggest he would have been on the podium.

The hard tyres cost most cars around a second a lap, resulting in most teams running two stints on soft tyres and a short - about 12 laps - on the harder tyres.

The new rear flap was demonstrated to be of little use if cars are of broadly similar performance. For this race, it was permitted only on the 800 metre main straight. However, where a significant performance differential exists, then reducing the downforce on the main straight did allow a much easier overtaking move.

Towards the end of the race, Button came up behind Massa again. This time, Button - with much less to lose than at the beginning of a race - took an extremely aggressive stance and dived inside Massa, forcing the Ferrari driver wide to get a dose of his own medicine.

But the real winners of this race were the fans who have been treated to some of the closest racing F1 has seen - certainly the closest at the start of a season - for a very long time.

UPDATE PROVIDED BY FERRARI

Following post race scrutineering, the two Saubers of Sergio Perez and Kamui Kobayashi have been disqualified because of a technical irregularity linked to the rear wing. This means that Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver Felipe Massa moves up from ninth to seventh in the classification of the Australian Grand Prix, thus bringing home an additional four points, which moves Ferrari up to third place in the Constructors’ Championship.