As I’ve been looking at the test times vaguely over the last few weeks I keep doing a stupid double take. I keep thinking to myself. Okay those numbers are interesting but we won’t know what they mean until we see Michael’s time. And then I realise that I’m being silly.

The problem isn’t that I’m missing Michael per say but more that I don’t know naturally what the baseline is. Michael always provided that. You always knew that Michael had this machine like consistency and to an extent the Ferrari has been the car to beat (even when the Renault was the fastest we knew it was fast because it could beat the Ferrari).

My point is that with all of the uncertainty of this year causing predictions to be difficult this is going to be the main one. We just don’t know how they all compare to Michael. The others don’t yet seem to have the gravitas.