The old established order in Formula 1 has been blown apart at the start of the new season in Melbourne, Australia. The grandee teams like McLaren, Ferrari and Renault have been replaced at the front of the grid by newcomers Brawn GP and Red Bull. The grandees will bounce back, because they have the resources and the experience to develop their cars, but it could take some time and as a result we have an exciting season in prospect.

Formula 1 has endured a difficult winter, with the shock withdrawal of Honda in late November and the biting misery of the credit crunch forcing sponsors from the banking sector to announce their withdrawal. The headlines since have been dominated by dour announcements about cost cutting measures, rather than racing.

It needed renewal, some fresh positivity, and it has found it this weekend in the shape of Brawn GP, the team born from the wreckage of Honda.

Ross Brawn, the engineer behind all of Michael Schumacher's world championships with Benetton and Ferrari, led a management buyout of the team, which rescued it only weeks before the start of the new season.

But with only seven days of testing under its belt, less than half the amount of the other teams, the Brawn car has come to Melbourne and blown the field away. There has only been one story this weekend and Brawn has been at the heart of it, with rival teams protesting a controversial part on the car, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin group jumping on the bandwagon with an 11th hour sponsorship deal and then yesterday confirmation of the car's dominance with a lock out of the front row of the grid in qualifying, Jenson Button taking pole ahead of team- mate Rubens Barrichello.

The cars are designed to new rules this year, which are intended to reduce the amount of aerodynamic downforce and thus slow them down. The Brawn car is in front because it has lost less downforce than its rivals. It's a good car in all areas, but has a very clever solution at the back in an area called the diffuser, which sucks the back of the car down to the ground, giving it exceptional grip in the corners. Rival teams protested against the design on Thursday, claiming it violates the spirit of the rules, but the stewards threw the protest out. The other teams have appealed that decision and the appeal will be heard on April 14, by which time the season will be two races old.

For Button it is a shot at the big time after a career of false starts, poor team choices and poor cars. Last year he toiled at the back of the grid in the Honda, now he's at the front. He endured a winter of soul searching, Honda's withdrawal threatened to end his career at the age of 29 and he is very grateful for the second chance.

"Going from having no drive and no future to putting it on pole here is amazing," said Button. "I've got to give credit to Ross and to Nick Fry, Brawn GP's CEO for pulling it all together. It's a long time since I've had a competitive car, probably 2006 when I got pole here and won his only victory, in Hungary."

The Brawn cars are substantially faster than the rest, that much was clear yesterday in qualifying. But the scary part for rival teams is that the car is actually faster in race conditions, heavy with fuel, than on a single lap burst in qualifying.

Button and Barrichello will romp away from the field into a private battle of their own. Sebastien Vettel in the Red Bull will give chase with the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen a distant sixth and seventh on the grid. The last time a car was as dominant as this was the Ferrari of 2004, also engineered by Brawn, in which Schumacher clinched the world title. His team-mate on that occasion was Barrichello, on whom the irony is not lost, "The dominant time we had at Ferrari, we had 20,000 kilometres of testing before the season; here we had three days each in the car," said the Brazilian. "This car is a wonderful car to drive, well-balanced and looking after the tyres. So we have everything we need to go forward. I was very glad to see Virgin sign with us this morning because now it means we have some more money to develop this car. It will be very good for the first four races, but we need things coming in to keep it going on."

For reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton and McLaren-Mercedes the start of this season has been as bad as the end of last season was good. They have the opposite situation to Brawn in that they threw huge effort into developing their car right up to the end of last year and it has cost them.

Hamilton's car is slow and yesterday he suffered the further indignity of a gearbox failure, which has forced him to start the defence of his title from the the second back row of the grid.

"The car, whilst driving it doesn't feel so bad, generally it seems to lack a bit of pace," he said. "It's a new goal and a new challenge for us. We are working very hard to make up lost time and get back to the front. We have a very good team and the ability to recover from situations like this more than others, although it's not going to be easy.

"I still feel we're going to come back strong. We still have the team and opportunity to win this championship, regardless if others are a bit ahead of us at the moment."

Hamilton's situation is not made any easier by another new rule for 2009, under which testing has been banned, for cost saving reasons. It costs £1000 per lap to run a Formula One car, so millions have been slashed out of budgets by keeping the cars off the test track. So all development work has to take place in the virtual world, on computer simulators and in wind-tunnels.

McLaren has a great track record at developing cars and Hamilton should be competitive by the British Grand Prix in June at the latest. If that sounds like a long time, it is because they are coming from around a second per lap off the pace of the Brawns. There are few shortcuts in this sport.

Button's joy and Hamilton's dejection are two sides of the same coin, namely proof that in Formula One you are really only as good as your equipment.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson appreciates this and in a spectacular piece of opportunism he was on hand yesterday to announce his company's first foray into F1 sponsorship and watch his new cars grab the front row. Branson's involvement is at present only at a relatively low level, but the billionaire hinted yesterday that he will be negotiating with the team to increase that, with an equity stake in the team one of the proposals on the table. Brawn can afford to play hardball as the results he gains in the early races will only drive up the ratecard.