Okay doke, F1 is back - and it promises to be better than ever.

Whether it will live up to expectations remains to be seen, but qualifying went pretty well today with the grid a little more unusual than people had probably expected.

Lewis outqualifying Jenson and Vettel being ahead of Webber aren’t big shocks but Alonso being behind Massa and the returning Schuey being behind Rosberg will have raised a few eyebrows I’m sure.

Whether we should be shocked about Schumacher or not is debatable as it is his first qualifying session for quite some time, we’ll wait until after the race before we mark his scorecard.

I’ve not written much about F1 this season, not in comparison to the previous years - probably down to a general downturn in the number of posts I’ve written and also due to David Coulthard’s retirement.

I’ve still watched all the races, but nothing has really motivated me enough to write about it!

This week has been different though.

Firstly we had the horrendous accident which Felipe Massa endured during qualifying last Saturday - and by horrendous, I mean the outcome of the crash as at the time it was quite undramatic.

This has been a pretty disasterous start to the season for the two teams most people fancied to be up there challenging for the championship.

Prior to the season commencing, I heard McLaren say (boast?) that they had been working on this car for the last 18 months which would make you think that it would be pretty good.  It hasn’t been.

Ferrari were the first team I heard say that last season had affected their concentration on this new season - their reasoning being that they had to continue trying to develop last year’s car right up until the very last race, thereby eating into resources which should really have left last year’s car behind and turned their attention to the new challenger.

After finishing that previous post about McLaren and what this week may hold for them, I got to thinking about what may be in store longer term.

In 2007 we had Spy-gate when they were accused of being in possession of certain information which really belonged to their arch-rivals Ferrari.

Now, in 2009, we have Lie-gate were two of their employees have been accused of lying to the race stewards in order to “steal” a third place off the Toyota driver Jarno Trulli.  When one of those employees is the current World Champion and their star driver, obviously this is a big deal.

This week sees McLaren in the dock once more following the happenings at this year’s Australian Grand Prix.

While it doen’t exactly follow hot on the heels of their last visit in 2007 which resulted in them being thrown out of the Constructors Championship and handed a massive $100million fine, it has come far too quickly for that previous visit to have slipped from anyone’s mind.

Part of me thinks that McLaren’s damage limitation exercise of the past couple of weeks will have done enough for them to escape any serious punishment, but there’s also a part of me that fears they may get the book thrown at them again.