Gary Anderson: F1 2015's real winners and losers

Sometimes what you see playing out in front of you in grand prix racing can be confusing, and to properly make sense of it requires a bit of time to dig through the numbers.

I have done just that and comparing each team's performance with Melbourne last year throws up some surprises. While the performance of each car in the race painted a promising picture for a team such as Ferrari, for example, when you look at the outright pace of each car, things don't look very good for the Scuderia at all.

But we'll come back to that later. Firstly, taking each team's fastest weekend lap from 2014 for either driver - and comparing that to each one's fastest lap from 2015 - we get the following picture:

If you compare those figures with the Mercedes improvement, based on the fact that the world champion team was also able to progress from the level it was at last year, then its rivals had a lot more room to go forwards.

They should all have closed the gap to Mercedes. But by my calculations, only three teams have made any gains in this regard.

What has everyone gained or lost relative to Mercedes?

It is always difficult to pinpoint where improvements come from, particularly with the best cars.

Looking at the Mercedes, I think it is in all areas. I would say it's 60 per cent power unit, 40 per cent chassis.

Obviously, that's putting 100 per cent of the gain down to Mercedes, but I am also sure there is a small improvement coming from the tyres this year.

1 Lotus: 2.038s gain

Lotus is the most improved team pace-wise but I don't think we can read much into this.

It had a nightmare of a start to 2014 and by regrouping and getting the team restructured, and changing to the Mercedes engine for 2015, big gains were almost inevitable. So most of this improvement relative to the Mercedes team is simply because Lotus made such a poor start to 2014.

Unfortunately it did not capitalise on this in the race - both cars went out in the first two minutes.

2 Sauber: 0.507s gain

Very much like Lotus, Sauber had a terrible 2014 and will have dug deep to find the reason for this.

The car looks much better balanced, and in Felipe Nasr and - to some extent - Marcus Ericsson they have two young and hungry drivers.

After not scoring at all in 2014 it already has points on the board this year, which will be a huge relief to the team.

3 Williams: 0.154s gain

It has closed that gap down just a little bit, but again Williams wasn't in as good a shape in Melbourne last year as it was later in the 2014 season.

I am sure some of this relative gain would diminish if we made the same comparison with Williams later in the season, once it had re-adapted to life at the front of the grid and had started getting the most out of its 2014 car.

4 Toro Rosso: 0.498s loss

Toro Rosso actually lost a little bit of ground to Mercedes but this one is difficult to read.

It has two very inexperienced drivers. They have shown themselves to be very talented but I think it will be mid-season before we really get a true measure of where their future is going to take them.

5 Ferrari: 0.673s loss

It is from here on down that really interests me in this comparison.

We keep hearing how Ferrari has improved so much this year, but the facts don't show that.

It has lost over half a second to Mercedes. It has two topline drivers, so no excuses there, and if Ferrari is really going to challenge at the front it needs to get on with development, because Mercedes is making more gains than the Prancing Horse as it stands.

6 Red Bull: 0.996s loss

I'm getting a bit older now but I can still remember when this team was the dominant force - it really wasn't that long ago. Where has that gone?

These days the team seems to put all its energy into berating Renault for anything that happens.

Perhaps it would be wiser simply to look down the pitlane and see what sister team Toro Rosso is up to. It might just be time to learn from the 'junior' squad.

7 Force India: 1.078s loss

Having missed most of pre-season with its 2015 car, Force India has not had the time to experiment with the variations of setup that testing would normally allow.

The testing it did manage was mainly focused on reliability running, so the team will be hoping that this might just allow it to nick a few points in the early part of the season - as it did last weekend with both cars in the top 10.

Force India losing ground has allowed a couple of other teams to get between it and the front of the grid. So points are going to be difficult to come by unless the others continue to have problems.

8 McLaren: 3.950s loss

I don't really know where to start with this one.

We saw at the beginning of 2014 that a few teams, and especially engine manufactures, were having problems, but those fade into insignificance compared with what McLaren and Honda are going through.

From the start of testing, I have been saying that no one is standing up and taking responsibility for these problems. It is time for Ron Dennis to show he has taken over responsibility for the team.

The technical issues are one thing, but I can see no reason why McLaren and Honda can't turn up the wick for that one lap in qualifying.

Honda is saying that it couldn't do that because the cooling was borderline.

Everyone has been talking about how compact the rear of the McLaren is; well, perhaps it's time to open this area up a bit. Get some extra cooling to the engine and that might just allow Honda some room to experiment and see what power is available.

McLaren qualified both cars on the back row of the grid and Jenson Button finished last in 11th position. But at least it got to the chequered flag, which I think in reality is the last thing even McLaren-Honda expected.

The team must look back to last year when Ricciardo's exclusion promoted its cars to second and third and wonder what has happened in the interim.

As I have said many times during winter testing, no-one at McLaren seems to be grabbing the problems by the throat. They are all too nice about the whole situation.

Everyone keeps saying they thought Honda would arrive with a rocket ship of a power unit. I have to ask why?

We all remember Honda's last foray into F1 - first as a partner with BAR before taking over the team to make it a full works operation.

With Button as its lead driver, Honda tried for many years to win a championship.

Then when things got really tough, Honda retreated to Japan after two disastrous years, leaving Ross Brawn to run things. Brawn GP went on to win the 2009 world championship and the all-conquering Mercedes team also grew out of it.

Jenson must be having a few nightmares about all this and wondering why he didn't just retire at the end of 2014.

As far as the absent Fernando Alonso is concerned, he must be asking what he has to do to get into a successful car before he is past his sell-by date.

The old saying is 'the only way is up'. It might just take a while for McLaren and Honda to live up to that.

An uninspiring race

The Australian Grand Prix was not the most exciting I have ever seen, partly because only 15 cars started the race. Other than the farcical 2005 USGP, that's the smallest grid since the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix when only 12 started.

Someone, somewhere, needs to take a note of this and take action, otherwise TV audiences are going to drop dramatically.

I'm now retired from being directly involved in F1, so as an armchair enthusiast for the Australian GP, I have to say Sunday was less than impressive.

With three rookies starting the race mid-pack, I was expecting fireworks at the first corner. We got those - to some extent - but after that initial excitement, and the retirement of Romain Grosjean under the safety car, we had just 13 cars left.

But credit where credit is due, the three rookies handled the weekend exceptionally well. Perhaps it's time to look at putting an upper age limit on F1, instead of the lower limit that comes in for next year?

At the start of the race when the competition was at its toughest, Felipe Nasr was running in fifth position with Daniel Riccardo and Kimi Raikkonen behind.

During this period, when the cameras were on him waiting for Riccardo to pounce, Nasr drove like a true professional. His fifth place made him the rookie of the weekend. In fact, he was one of the stars of the weekend overall.

I would single out Sauber as the team of the weekend. It has made a firm recovery from a dismal 2014 and, more importantly, it didn't allow the legal battles with Giedo van der Garde ruin the weekend. The result was 14 points more than it managed all of last season.

Before Max Verstappen's Toro Rosso started billowing smoke, he also drove very well. Verstappen will be disappointed, but at 17 years old and the youngest driver to start a grand prix he has a promising future in F1.

Carlos Sainz Jr struggled at the end with worn-out tyres, but on the way to ninth place he did a competent job, and those two points on his debut could mean a lot at the end of the season. His double World Rally champion Dad will be proud of him.