In case you were hoping for a spectacular start to the 2015 Formula One season, you might have been slightly disappointed by what you saw yesterday. Is Mercedes to go unchallenged yet again?

The simple answer to that question is a very probable ‘Yes’. They dominated the weekend start to finish and not even the quite promising Ferraris could keep up in any way with either Lewis or Nico Rosberg, who finished just 1.36s behind his teammate.

Third place went to Sebastian Vettel, whose much-improved Ferrari was still over half a minute slower than the Mercedes cars by the end of the race, while 4th and 5th went to Williams‘ Felipe Massa and Sauber’s Felipe Nasr.

Despite the uneventful finish, the race did get off to a good start with Kimi Raikkonen being involved in a little “fender bender” while Lotus’ Pastor Maldonado spun his car and hit the tire barrier – which meant he had to retire.

The virtual safety car was engaged, keeping the drivers in check before the brand new Mercedes-AMG GT S Safety Car made its first official 2015 appearance.

As soon as the race resumed, Rosberg was caught off guard by his teammate who managed to pull away and build a small lead that he ultimately never gave up. Still, there were a few good moments to recount, such as the Massa vs. Vettel and Nasr vs. Ricciardo vs. Raikkonen dogfights.

As for the not so good moments, Lotus‘ Grosjean was forced to retire, which must have felt like deja vu for the a team that got off to a horrendous start to the season last year. We certainly felt bad for them, because both their drivers had shown strong pace in Saturday’s qualifying session.

Kimi Raikkonen had to retire as well, after just 41 laps in which he was matching the pace of Massa’s Williams. And speaking of Williams, they were outplayed in the pits where Vettel managed to pull ahead of Massa thanks to a slightly better team strategy.

The teams now have two weeks to get ready for Malaysia and try to close the gap on Mercedes as much as possible. We’re not very hopeful though.

10 Random Things We’ve Noticed

– Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator) made an appearance and was also asked to perform the podium interviews where he left us with the impression that he didn’t know either Nico Rosberg or Sebastian Vettel by name. Oh and he actually made Lewis say “I’ll be back”. Corny.

– Aside from the AMG GT S and AMG C 63 we saw in the pits, there was also an E63 AMG that nobody seems to know anything about.

– Red Bull may be in more trouble that we thought. Ricciardo got off to a very poor start off the line and only managed to keep up with the 2nd tier cars because of the RB11‘s very good front end.

– Ferrari looks really quick in a straight line. Much quicker than they were last year and perhaps on par with Williams this year. Definitely faster than Red Bull.

– Speaking of fast, the good people at Sauber have to be really pleased with their cars and especially their drivers. The C34 so far is looking like a tier 2 car (along with Williams and Ferrari).

– ‘Felipe Nasr’ sounds just like ‘Felipe Massa’ coming straight from the commentators mouths. Seriously, it’s both hilarious and annoying.

– We love the way the Force India cars look this year. Really cool livery. Massive upgrade over previous year.

– McLaren-Honda said that they look at Jenson finishing the race as a “win” because of all the valuable information they were able to collect. We look at it as being sad. The only team that looks worse were Marussia and they didn’t even take part in the race!

– Such a shame to hear about Williams’ Valtteri Bottas not being able to race because of a tear in a disc in his lower back. These types of things are never pretty and they’re really hard to recover from.

– Some really good racing overall from newcomers such as Nasr, Eriksson and Sainz. The talent pool is definitely looking better and better.

Melbourne Race Results

1. Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes
2. Nico Rosberg, Mercedes
3. Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari
4. Felipe Massa, Williams
5. Felipe Nasr, Sauber
6. Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull
7. Nico Hulkenberg, Force India
8. Marcus Eriksson, Sauber
9. Carlos Sainz, Toro Rosso
10. Sergio Perez, Force India
11. Jenson Button, McLaren