The race is on and in a few days it will be for real, with the Australian Grand Prix kicking off the first action of the 2020 Formula One season.

The talking is over, the testing is over, and come Saturday afternoon in Melbourne, everyone will finally have

to lay their cards on the table and we'll see how quick everyone really is. But with Mercedes,

looking strong in testing, might the season opener have a sting in this hail, just like it did

last year when favourite Ferrari failed. I'm Ed Sture and joining me to preview the new seasoner,

Scott Mitchell and Mark Hughes.

Scott Mitchell, you're recovering from the arduousness of testing in your Stockholm bolthole.

How's it over there?

Yeah, it's not too bad, thank you. It's nice and cold.

Weekend we had lovely blue skies and sunshine, but today's given way to lots of cloud and misery so it's a little

bit like being back in in london i think but just a little bit colder while talking of people in

remote locations we've also got mark hughes you're up in the north is it is it grim up north as

always or is it sunny and pleasant you know Manchester if you draw a line through the middle of the UK,

it's still in the south, so I'm not that remote. And it's been raining for about 40 days.

So, yeah, I don't know. That's the sign of the apocalypse coming, but it's stopped today, so maybe

we get away with it. Well, that's the list of of the signs of the apocalypse then. That's extending a reasonable amount at the moment. But we'll let you be a southerner then on your geographical definition. That's a good way to join the club. So that makes Scott the most northerly one. So there we go. We've got that solved. Well, we've got the new season starting. Testing kind of suggested Mercedes was in pretty good shape.

But it was an interesting one, wasn't it, Mark? Because it was, it wasn't quite as clear cut as perhaps last year's was. And of course, last year's proved not to be very effective in predicting Melbourne.

But there's a few things you can slice and dice that

suggests that certainly Ferrari are a lot stronger than they looked. And then there's also this

sort of feeling of what Red Bull might be able to do. Yeah, exactly. I think Mercedes of the top

three teams had the most straightforward program. So they got their performance running done in,

mainly in the first week, actually,

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