My brain says, however meh you might think Kmag and Palmer are, they aren't 2-3 seconds down on their team mates bad, not even close. SO the cars are having trouble, Kmag probably had some kind of engine issues, Palmer may have had a rebuild the car and something wasn't done right issue.
If you take the second Williams, Haas and Renault cars and put them within 1-2/10ths of their sister cars, then Mclaren are absolutely freaking no where. A lot of people saying Mclaren aren't as bad as everyone thought, but realistically you've got at least three significantly faster cars with various problems pushing Alonso 3 places up the grid. Mclaren are only faster than Sauber but Sauber look to have improved a fair bit compared to testing and they are still running last years engine so they should be a 0.5-1seconds off the back of everyone else.
We'll have to see what happens over the next few races. I do think it's simply possible that some of these drivers haven't ever driven a car with this level of downforce and it will take time to build the confidence to throw it into corners. At Barcelona you have very few corners that basically go straight into walls so confidence at such a track would take longer than at Barcelona. We could see some drivers just being dire in these cars and being replaced before coming back to Barcelona. If guys continued to be well over a second down on their team mates(I'm presuming it will close compared to where it is now) then the teams would have to think about replacing them.
When it comes to Hamilton and Merc vs Ferrari, I think Hamilton is the biggest difference between Merc and Ferrari in that result. Hamilton is simply insane at pulling out 2-3/10ths on his other driver, with bottas and Rosberg being very good qualifiers but Hamilton just being that next level completely. The gap between Bottas and Vettel makes me think that at least in australia, there is sub 1/10th in speed between the two cars.
Merc's strength in the past three years has been an incredibly consistent car, equally excellent at high/low downforce tracks. Ferrari's is much more of a concept change in overall design so I can see it being both harder to set up for each track and has more potential to be a little inconsistent, great at some tracks, less good at others. Ferrari may have hit it out of the park and it's great everywhere which would bode very well for the whole season.
Also possible Merc with the ultra long wheelbase may find they are a little less consistent at different types of track. Will be interesting to see, definitely good to see Ferrari looking this close in the first race of a very new aero concept.
