So the fans in the stands were not terribly impressed with the noise, and frankly after listening to this I don't blame them:I suppose that the bottom line for Ferrari is that we have to be reasonably pleased that both cars got home at the end. Alonso looked reasonably quick as compared to the mid-fielders, so this car likely won't be struggling with the back-of-the-packers. There's clearly still much to do to make this a competitive package.
Your overwhelming winner on the day was Mercedes, powering four of the top five places (and five of the top six), with Alonso being the only outlier.
Renault has to be the overwhelming loser, between problems for Vettel and the total Caterham collapse and Lotus' problems. The highest place non-excluded finisher was a Toro Rosso back in 8th.
The honorable mention for being the loser has to be Red Bull, with Riccardo's car being excluded at the end -- one can only assume that had Vettel made the flag he would have had similar problems, Red Bull never being shy about doing what they think is right even in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise. At least the car wasn't slow and illegal.
Bottas showed that the Williams can be fast in the right hands, promising for them.
However over all the racing felt very dry to me. Now this has been a common complaint for me about Australia, something about the circuit does not seem to be conducive to generating entertaining racing. So I'll reserve judgement for now on the new rules.
Another complaint I had was that the safety car period felt like it went on for ever and ever, and TSN piling on commercial after commercial didn't help that feeling. You can say a lot about the old CART days, but one thing they knew how to do was a safety car period.
