Ferrari and Red Bull came away from Bahrain with their heads held high - despite the costly spark plug failure of the latter. McLaren and Mercedes, meanwhile, fell short of their aspirations. Adam Cooper explains why

While the media has rightly been scrambling to work out how to improve the show after Bahrain, the engineers have spent the past five days ploughing through the data, trying to work out just what the first race of the no refuelling era was all about.

In the end, much came down to qualifying and the start. That's no great novelty, but under the current rules – with one stop the likely norm – it's clear that teams will have to pay even more attention to single-lap performance and drivers will have to be ever more aggressive into Turn 1.

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