Motorsport: Keeping focus on track

Key Formula One duellists Ferrari and McLaren are facing potential problems - will their manpower be as switched on as their machinery?

Does Kimi Raikkonen want to be a dreamer or a driver? Will Lewis Hamilton be a rock star or a racer?

Raikkonen, having won the world title in 2007, appeared distinctly uninterested last year as Hamilton became the youngest driver to take the crown.

And while Ferrari will need a rather more revved-up Raikkonen this season, Hamilton has been occupied by his own extra-curricular distractions.

Now with a pop star girlfriend, an MBE from the Queen and even underwear in the mail from a Japanese fan, the Briton has as much to occupy him off the track as on it.

He jets from his home in Switzerland, having fled England to escape the attention, to see Pussycat Dolls lead singer Nicole Scherzinger but recently the flights have been shorter - to testing sessions in Spain, where the dominant Mercedes McLaren cars struggled to keep pace with their rivals.

The spotlight on Hamilton has now turned to a glare and the driver's frankness tends to polarise people. There is even a lewishamiltonsucks.com website for the haters.

Hamilton, though, is philosophical.

"Well I'm involved in a sport that is fortunate to have massively passionate fans," he said.

"I know I've got a lot of people who don't particularly like me, but there are also people who are there supporting me. You just have to rise above it because everyone's entitled to his or her own opinion."

He has also shrugged off the pressure of defending the world championship. He says he has already won the title and doesn't need to keep proving the point.

"I'm not approaching this year as champion. I want to go into it with a similar attitude to the one I had at the start of my second year," Hamilton said.

"I want to have more wins, I want to have fewer mistakes and I want to blow people away."

That might be tough if testing is any indication - and it often isn't.

However, McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh admitted the car which was tested in Jerez and Barcelona in preparation for the Australian Grand Prix may not be a contender.

"At the moment the car isn't fast enough and certainly not by our team's extremely high standards," a blunt Whitmarsh said.

"But Lewis is the world champion and he became world champion in one of our cars, so anything less than success at that level is naturally regarded as unsatisfactory by us, by our partners, by the media and by the fans.

"But the problems are fixable. Many times in Formula One history successful teams have started off with a car that was not working as well as they had hoped it would and many times those successful teams engineered their way back to the front of the grid in impressively short order.

"That is what we want to do; in fact that is what we are already doing."

Hamilton, meanwhile, has pinpointed Ferrari's exuberant Brazilian driver Felipe Massa as the strongest challenger for the crown this year, ignoring any reference to Raikkonen.

"Felipe will be strong because he's coming off the back of a stunning season and he has Ferrari in the palm of his hand," Hamilton said.

"He's definitely going to be as hungry as ever.

"[Renault driver] Fernando [Alonso] had a strong end to last year and I expect they'll have a more competitive car this year and will be challenging for wins."

Raikkonen - regarded by his supporters as enigmatic and his detractors as just plain boring - rarely gives opinions on his sport beyond five-word sentences, but last year the Finn was especially detached.

Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo said Raikkonen was so vague it seemed it was his twin brother who was driving his cars.

Ferrari team director Stefano Domenicali said Raikkonen "lives on his own planet".

The former world champion is positive - by his standards at least - about Ferrari's prospects and his state of mind this season.

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't have the motivation or hunger to be in F1 any more," a positively loquacious Raikkonen gushed.

"Even if last year wasn't exactly what we wanted, it doesn't change how much I like F1. I enjoy it. We made some wrong choices, some mistakes and it took too long to recover from those.

"But there is no point talking about last year. That is in the past ... I hope we can win championships this year."

Of the rest, BMW and Renault offer the most potential in terms of upsetting the established order.

But the biggest surprise has been Brawn GP, formerly Honda, which was rescued by ex-Honda and ex-Ferrari technical boss Ross Brawn.

His drivers, Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, have led the testing at Jerez and could be the dark horse in the field.

This year all teams will have to adjust (once again) to radical new rules including slick tyres, reduced aerodynamics and a system called KERS.

This system takes kinetic energy generated from braking and transfers it to a storage point where drivers can use it, under strict conditions, by pushing a button to get a sort of turbo thrust when overtaking.

KERS is being used by Ferrari and Renault in Melbourne and is likely to be subject to more testing, but the slick tyres and aerodynamic changes should ultimately lead to closer racing and less differentiation between the front and rear of the grid.

- AAP