• German in search of three successive world titles
• Button impressive in practice for Australian Grand Prix

Formula One is alive with dancing new images this season, new drivers, a new venue, and a new television station anxious to beguile and dazzle by painting vivid new colours in front of its audience.

And yet, on the eve of the opening Formula One grand prix of the season, it is a dog-eared old picture that fills the mind: it is of a grinning Sebastian Vettel raising a triumphant forefinger to the world.

Even in Friday’s two practice sessions, dominated respectively by Jenson Button and Michael Schumacher, Vettel came 11th and then 10th but still caught the eye, as will the outline of a shark that is lurking just below the surface. Vettel finds it difficult to travel incognito.

His team principal at Red Bull, Christian Horner, becomes almost breathless with admiration when he talks about him. “All Sebastian has achieved so far in his career is unbelievable. He’s the youngest points scorer; youngest pole position winner; youngest race winner; youngest champion; youngest double champion …

“He has grown in experience, and you forget he is only 24 years of age and done just 81 grands prix. His confidence is obviously very high, and the level he has been operating on has been remarkable.”

Even by the heady standards of a new season’s eve the excitement here is profound. There have never been six world champions on the grid before. New regulations appear to have squeezed up the field. Michael Schumacher has an impressive Mercedes to drive, for a change, Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton look even leaner and have things to prove, Kimi Raikkonen is back and immediately fast, Button looks serene once more and Fernando Alonso, even when he is glowering behind the leaders, looks an immense force.

And yet it is impossible to look beyond Vettel. It is not only because he has won the past two world championships. It is the manner of the winning – particularly last year, when he swept all before him – that dominates the thought patterns when looking to the months ahead.

He is fast, of course. He has the best car, probably, for it has been designed by the inimitable Adrian Newey, who makes slipstream experts of all other technical directors. But it is Vettel’s intelligence that is his most salient quality, the suggestion he makes that driving at high speed while understanding the data and working the complex machinery around him occupies a comparatively low percentage of his capability.

So, like other great champions before him, such as Jim Clark, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, he has the time to look about him, to absorb conditions and the performances of his rivals; he is deeply impressive. His improvement last year, when he eschewed the few impetuous errors he made in 2010, was so striking that one wonders what he has in store for us this time.

Horner says: “He is capable of winning the drivers’ title once again, and I know he’s very motivated to try and ensure he retains the trophy. That doesn’t underestimate the competition and the opponents we’re up against. Plus, it’s easy to forget this is only our eighth car, our eighth season as a team. So we’ve come a long way in a very short space of time. But we’ve got all the right ingredients to try and learn from what we achieved last year and the year before.”

Vettel, then, is the man to beat. And there was more than a suggestion that the Red Bulls were weighed down by heavy fuel levels; the sandbaggers’ last stand, perhaps. The German could become only the third driver to deliver a hat-trick of titles. But it really could be something special this year, and the past two years haven’t been too shabby.

“I’ve never known it as open as this,” Button says. “Never. The last five or six years I’ve raced you would have the McLarens or the Ferraris or, one year, the Brawn, then the Red Bull in 2010 and 2011, but no, I’ve never known it like it is this time.

“I remember my karting days in 1996 and 1997 when we’d have an eight-race European championship and I might win two of them, and the others would be won by other people. There was always a different winner and it was really competitive and it would be good to see that again here.”

Button, more reliable than his McLaren team-mate Hamilton, could be Vettel’s biggest challenger, as he was last year. But Hamilton remains the soap’s most compelling star, the one driver, perhaps, who can wrench the crown from Vettel, provided his car is competitive.

But another bad year for Hamilton and there will be those who will conclude that his decline is permanent. And they will be difficult to argue with. After that the most interesting question marks settle on Raikkonen. The Finn will be fast. When was he ever slow? But can he lead his team as powerfully as Robert Kubica once did?

And what of Schumacher? He is not what he was, we know that. He was unable to arm-wrestle a bad car on to the podium. But can he win another race with a good car? Melbourne is the time, as Vettel famously said, when “everyone pulls their pants down. Then you can see what they have got and you show what you have got.”

Sport: Motor sport | guardian.co.uk