Ahead of a season opener that sees some of the biggest changes ever witnessed, one thing remains reassuringly the same...

"A new beginning of a season, we'll just have to see how it goes," Kimi Raikkonen told reporters. "I'm with a new team but I have been here before which definitely makes life easier."

New team, well sort of, he's back with Ferrari, the team with which he won here in 2007, when making his debut with the Maranello outfit. Then, of course, there was last season's victory with Lotus.

"Every season there are question marks and how many depends on how the testing has gone," he continued. "This year, with quite a lot of rule changes it's a bit harder to know where we are and what's going to happen, even if everyone has a rough idea of where we are going to be. We will have to wait until after the first few races to get a clearer picture. But there is no point guessing where we are now.

"Some teams have looked a bit faster than us in testing, but here we are in a different place, a very different track to Bahrain and different things can happen. Obviously I want to win and hopefully we can be up there and fight for the championship. The weather could be a bit tricky this weekend and with the new rules there could be a different scenario to the days when we raced with more fuel.

"I don't think this circuit is particularly special," he admitted, characteristically giving so very little away, "although it's a nice place for everybody to come. As it's the first race of the season, usually something happens and it makes for exciting racing, but just because I won here last year, it doesn't mean this year will be just as good. You want to score as many points as you can. Hopefully we won't have too many issues and can have a clean weekend and then we can see where we end up compared to the others."

Asked how he will approach the weekend, a weekend so hard to predict that the FIA already has a plan in place should all the cars fail to finish, the Iceman replied: "There are a lot of areas where we still need to improve all the time and I hope we will be happy with the car right from the start of tomorrow's practice."

Check out our Thursday gallery, here.

Chris Balfe