What else did we learn about the 2011 regulations? One thing which is becoming clear is that teams have to plan their weekends backwards as much as possible. That is, where do you want to be in the last stint of the race - and with what tyre condition and track position? The aim will be to strike the right balance, and that will determine how you approach the rest of the race in order to set yourself up for the last stint. It will also determine how many laps you want to do in qualifying.

The top eight in Malaysia - the Red Bulls, McLarens, Ferraris and Renaults - illustrated these points. For example, Vettel only did one run each in Q1 and Q2; Mark Webber needed two runs in Q1 and was heavier on his rubber to boot, which meant a double-whammy for the race. Another example is Jenson Button in the race. In the first two stints he ran 4th. After his second stop he was up to 3rd, and after his third stop he was 2nd, where he would stay. His was a race that built perfectly to the final stint.

What Button demonstrated was that pitting earlier to get onto fresh rubber first is generally an advantage, but in the last stint you’ll have to make the tyres last. And pitting first to leap up the order isn’t always the rule either; Fernando Alonso leapfrogged Nick Heidfeld at the first stops despite pitting later. And trying to hang on with dying tyres doesn’t always work against a rival who has gambled on making an extra stop but has a newer set of boots.

Indeed, Webber became the first example amongst the frontrunners this year of a driver making up all the time lost in a pit stop through having better tyres. After Lewis Hamilton’s third stop, he had Webber right behind him, with Heidfeld and Felipe Massa not far behind. The Australian stopped for a fourth time, but clawed all the deficit back up and overtook Massa with a brilliant move, passed Hamilton when he ran wide, and caught and all but passed Heidfeld for the final podium position.

Not bad for a man who had to do without KERS all race. Mark was on the back foot early on, especially at the start and then in his great battle with Kamui Kobayashi (in which they traded places no fewer than seven times!), having to carry all the KERS gear without its benefits. Having KERS but no DRS isn’t much use either, as Alonso will testify. This is good; it means that neither KERS or the DRS is making overtaking too easy. Even with both, there were very few instances of someone breezing past a rival.

What all this means is somewhat hard-to-follow racing, with teams and drivers involved in a game of cat-and-mouse and jostling for position, aiming to buy a ticket to the final stint. Purists may find it all a bit arbitrary but there’s no denying the potential for action galore, especially with drivers in different phases by chance or by design. And some awesome passing moves too, like Webber on Massa, Kobayashi’s battles with Webber and Michael Schumacher, Hamilton on Vitaly Petrov at turn 5, and so on.

Vettel has been untroubled because in the first two races he’s been able to do what he does best - get to the front and control the race from there. In Melbourne, Hamilton’s McLaren became wounded in the race, and in Malaysia Heidfeld did him a favour in the first stint, such that everyone else was playing catch-up. That is not to downplay what Seb and Red Bull have been doing, though. Vettel still has had to pull out the big laps in qualifying. He has had to make perfect starts. His crew have had to make faultless stops.

After pit stops, he has had to make assertive passing moves when necessary; in Melbourne he passed Button, and here he had to deal with Massa. Here, his KERS stopped working mid-race as well, but his lap times were not affected. He also came under attack from both McLarens which were at one stage within six seconds, but he never put a foot wrong. His final stop was also timed perfectly, balancing his rate of tyre wear, the rate Button on new tyres was catching him, and the length of his final stint.

In short, the World Champion has been in his element. Webber, on the other hand, has not. He tried to make a statement in practice at Sepang, but when it mattered in qualifying he was finding himself getting pipped again by Vettel and Hamilton’s inherent magic, and his KERS failure off the line doomed his chances. But the bigger issue is his rate of tyre wear; he was always going to make four stops. He’s hardly going to ever beat Vettel if he keeps on being slower and making more pit visits.

Why this championship is not a lay-down misere is because Vettel won’t always be able to lord it over the field. The McLarens are showing enough form to pose more than a serious threat if everything comes together. Button’s superb race management on Sunday has not received the credit it deserves, but Jenson’s issue is that he remains a few tenths shy of Hamilton on Saturday. Lewis’ fine effort in qualifying was undone by numerous mishaps in the race.

Being trapped behind Heidfeld in the early stages was one thing, but then there was also his slow third stop and his difficulties with his set of primes, which also included his clashes with sparring partner Alonso and an eventual fourth, unscheduled stop with four laps to go. As for the 20-second penalty he received after the race, leaving aside the bad taste that post-race penalties leave, there was little doubt that it was justified. He did move four times on Alonso down the front straight at the start of lap 45.

But a penalty for Alonso for, at worst, misjudging his move on the McLaren and paying the price by damaging his front wing? When in fact Hamilton also contributed by edging towards the centre of the track at the same time? That was a simply absurd ruling, but since Fernando did not lose a position we can all move on and hope that we don’t see another call this poor for a very long time. Instead we can focus on how Ferrari’s race pace gives Maranello hope when their qualifying speed is nowhere at the moment.

For whatever reason, the red cars just aren’t on the pace on low fuel, but in race conditions they can match the rest. Alonso did himself no favours by unnecessarily boxing himself behind Webber at the start, and so found himself behind Petrov and Massa. But at the first stop he made up places, put an opportunistic move on Button in the second stint, and would probably have jumped Hamilton into a comfortable 3rd but for a slow third stop of his own.

Maybe this explains Ferrari’s pre-season testing form - looking fine over long runs but with no one-lap pace to show. In the end, Alonso couldn’t quite catch back up to Massa, making it the first time the Brazilian has finished ahead of his team-mate (in a race where both saw the flag) since Turkey last year. Whilst Felipe seemed to be in the thick of the action, the reality is that once again he was slower than Fernando in qualifying, and throughout the race he made no real progress.

Renault ensured that they made progress on race day thanks to their lightning starts. In replicating Petrov’s Melbourne results, staving off Hamilton early and then holding his own behind Vettel, the McLarens and Alonso, it was the perfect way to bounce back after his horror weekend in Australia. Petrov was not so heroic. Pretty much all race he was at the tail of the top eight, even before his spectacular exit. But to say that that was mildly disappointing shows how far he has come in everyone’s expectations.

Kobayashi proved that Sergio Perez’s stunning one-stop drive in Melbourne was no fluke, as he two-stopped his way to what became 7th place. He largely spent the race dicing, first with Webber but then mainly with Schumacher, and in the end his strategy beat Michael’s three-stop plan by some 18 seconds. This could become a feature of this year’s races, with the Saubers making fewer stops and challenging others to catch and pass them on fresher rubber. With Kamui at the wheel, that can only mean fireworks!

Perez was playing the same game as his team-mate, and it would have been interesting to see where he would have finished up had he not retired - my guess is he would have been somewhere near Schumacher and Paul di Resta for the last two points positions. For Mercedes this was another event to forget. All of a sudden that last Barcelona test looks to have been fifteen minutes of fame. On current evidence, the W02 is only the fifth best car in the field, or maybe even behind the Saubers.

Having been pipped for a place in Q3 once again, as soon as Schumacher elected to copy the tyre strategy of the top ten he was unlikely to make any real ground. Then again, on reflection, if he had done something different and started on primes he would have been at too great a pace disadvantage. At the end of the day, Mercedes’ race pace just isn’t there, as evidenced by Nico Rosberg, who having made a torrid start from 9th on the grid, disappeared down a black hole for the rest of the afternoon.

Di Resta drove a second excellent race in succession to claim another point for 10th place, having once again out-qualified his team-mate Adrian Sutil. His race was made by a relatively early first stop which leapt the Scotsman in front of Rosberg and the Toro Rossos. But the lesson from the frontrunners applies equally to the midfield; the trade-off for that track position gain is that you need to make the tyres last later on, and Paul was able to do that.

Sutil did likewise, but his race was obscured because of his clash with Rubens Barrichello early on which forced a nosecone change. But get this: the German ran the last 24 laps on a set of options! This was as spectacular a feat as what Perez had achieved in Melbourne. Whilst the Force Indias lack the ultimate pace of the Saubers, it seems as though they may have a similar delicacy on tyres. Like the Swiss team, they could well be the tortoises in the midfield against their rival hares.

But it’s one thing to run long stints when you know your car’s easy on its rubber; it’s a bit of a disaster otherwise. Just ask Toro Rosso. From a strong 12th and 13th on the grid, and 11th and 12th early on, they made the cardinal sin of trying to stay out too long to make a two-stop strategy work. In the end, both Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari just slid down the field. Buemi wasn’t helped by incurring a stop-go penalty when his pit lane speed limiter failed.

That wasn’t the only thing that failed on the STR6s - so too, it would seem, were some of the bolts holding the cars together. There was that moment when Buemi’s left sidepod cover blew off in Q1, and then in the race it was a part from Alguersuari’s car that hit Perez’s Sauber, switching the Mexican’s car off. We have seen in recent times the danger of parts flying off fast-moving F1 cars, and frankly that’s just not on. "Reject of the Race" for the Malaysian GP goes to the bits flying off the Toro Rossos.

At least the Toro Rossos made it to the finish, which is more than could be said for Williams. In Melbourne, Barrichello showed flashes of speed, but even that was lacking here. The Brazilian was never going to make it out of Q2, whilst Pastor Maldonado didn’t even escape Q1, and now has the dubious honour of having been the first retirement in both of his first two GPs, having not made the 10-lap mark in either, on top of his amateurish crash on pit entry on the Friday.

Williams’ 4 out of 4 DNF rate means that they remain behind both Lotus and Virgin in the constructors championship. Lotus had reason to be chuffed with their performance over the weekend. Heikki Kovalainen was less than 0.4s slower than Maldonado in Q1, with Jarno Trulli only marginally behind. That put the green machines only 2 seconds off the pace. Whilst Trulli again had reliability issues in the race, Kovalainen also ran a two-stop strategy and finished right on Alguersuari’s tail.

Heikki also recorded a faster best lap of the race than the Spanish Toro Rosso driver. On the strength of this showing, Lotus can probably be considered as being at the tail of the midfield, and are now a realistic chance of making it past Q1 if they can find another few tenths and others make errors. Their gap to Virgin - there was over two seconds between Kovalainen and Timo Glock in Q1 - means that there is little point talking about the three-way battle between last year’s newcomer teams.

The problem with Virgin is that you just can’t see where their improvement is going to come from. The CFD philosophy clearly didn’t come up with any breakthroughs in the off-season, otherwise the team wouldn’t have ended up with virtually the same car as last year’s. So why should they come up with anything ingenious now? It looks like being a very long year ahead for poor Timo and also for Jerome D’Ambrosio, who can keep gaining experience out of the limelight but little else.

I hold to my view that a sorted-out HRT will run the Virgins close and possibly beat them. Vitantonio Liuzzi was only 0.55s behind D’Ambrosio, even if Narain Karthikeyan was a further second back, but both made the 107% cut. Both got some semi-decent miles, and the team now has its 2011 front wing at their disposal. Unlike Virgin, you sense that there is room for improvement both in terms of reliability and speed, and that is why the red and black team ought to be worried.