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After a promising start on Saturday despite the state of the track, which unforgivably was disintegrating during qualification, Lewis Hamilton’s pole position was all to no avail after driving into the back of Kimi Raikkonen after they had both pitted. Hamilton didn’t see the red light telling Raikkonen to stop and ploughed into the back of his Ferrari, while Niko Rosberg drove into the back of Hamilton. In addition to the Ferrari and McLaren being unable to continue, both Hamilton and Rosberg will be awarded a 10 place penalty for the next GP in France.

In the end it was Robert Kubica who was the hero of the day. After his massive smash in last year’s Canadian Grand Prix he must have been somewhat anxious at the thought of racing there again. But he needn’t have worried, winning his first Grand Prix, almost certainly the first of many.

After Sunday’s poor start to the Bahrain GP by Lewis Hamilton, which he afterwards admitted was his fault for having failed to put the car into start mode, McLaren are looking at their race start procedures to see what can be improved to remove this kind of doubt in future.

It also appears that Hamilton may have hit another car before running into the back of Fernando Alono due to the fact that his nose wing was broken before the impact. While McLaren haven’t ruled out the chance that the wing broke of its own accord, this possibility was downplayed by McLaren COO Martin Whitmarsh as it has not happened before.

With three weeks until the next Grand Prix at Barcelona, Hamilton and McLaren have some time to play with; however, with BMW Sauber looking stronger than ever before, this season is going to be much more than a 2 team competition and if Renault are able to deliver their promised performance improvements in time for Barcelona Hamilton cannot afford to drop too many more points.

BMW Sauber driver Robert Kubica took pole position in qualifying today, as he pipped Felipe Massa to the post at the last minute. Lewis Hamilton is in third place on the grid, with Kimi Raikkonen just ahead of Hamilton’s McLaren teammate Heikki Kovalainen.

A slight rule change was introduced in the qualifiers to prevent a repeat of the Malaysian Grand Prix, when the McLarens were deemed to have blocked rival teams on flying laps by their low speed out-lap, with the introduction of a minimum lap time. However, no driver was penalized for tomorrow’s race.

A stewards inquiry took place due to Massa ignoring a yellow flag at one stage of the race, however his conduct was not found to be dangerous and no penalty was applied.

The race starts at 12:30 BST.