After the first two races of the season only one team can rightly claim to have been impressive, and it ain’t Ferrari or McLaren.

That team is BMW Sauber, who currently lies second on the log in the Constructors’ Championship and also has one of its drivers in joint second place on the Drivers’.

Last season BMW was nibbling at the top two teams, but now it is very much one of the top three.

Both the defending champion, Ferrari, and the team that by rights should have been classified second, McLaren, have stumbled so far this season.

Ferrari’s performance in Australia was nothing short of a comedy of errors. A string of technical failures and driver mistakes combined to earn it a single point, while McLaren romped away with victory for Lewis Hamilton and fifth for Heikki Kovalainen — courtesy of an unlucky Safety Car period — and a total of 14 points.

To his credit, however, new team boss Stefano Domenicali rallied his troops behind him in Malaysia and the F2008 was untouchable. Well, almost, as one of the troops let the side down — again.

Felipe Massa committed his second successive driving error of the season at Sepang and after two races he doesn’t have a single point to his name. Even worse, he has not been able to take points off the team’s main competitors — something which could turn out to be a major factor at the end of the season. Small wonder then that all kinds of rumours are floating around about his future at Maranello.

Where McLaren-Mercedes looked untouchable in Melbourne, the same could not be said about it at Sepang. The MP4-23 struggled to make its Bridgestone rubber work; both drivers were penalised for unsporting behaviour during Saturday’s Qualifying (where are the howls of condemnation from the English-language media? How much different was Hamilton and Kovalainen’s behaviour to the Schumacher incident in Monaco in 2006?) and during the race a cock-up in the pits and the wrong tyre strategy cost Hamilton and the team a podium place. Just why the Briton did his first two stints on the softer compound and only the final one on the harder, better tyre only he will know.

While all of this went on around it, BMW Sauber remained calm in both races and raked in the points. Moreover, especially in Malaysia, it was clearly the second-fastest team.

In Australia Nick Heidfeld finished a strong second behind Hamilton, only five seconds behind the Englishman. The team was robbed of third place when Kazuki Nakajima in his Williams took out Robert Kubica through a rookie mistake.

In Malaysia BMW built on its potential and this time Kubica finished second, to Raikkonen, with Heidfeld sixth, mostly due to an unrepresentative grid position courtesy of the two McLaren boys on Saturday and slow traffic during the race on Sunday.

But Heidfeld set the fastest lap of the race towards the end when he was chasing down Hamilton for fifth, a tenth of a second quicker than the points leader’s best set in his own pursuit of Toyota’s Jarno Trulli for fourth.

The result? Heidfeld, along with Raikkonen, is only three points behind Hamilton and BMW only five down on McLaren.

"Well, we have set two targets for this year," BMW team principal Mario Theissen said after the Malaysian Grand Prix. "One was to turn the battle of two in front of us into a battle of three. And I think it looks like we are, at least in the two races so far, able to do that.

"The other target is to win our first race during the season. I am confident we can do that."

After the first two races of the season few will argue with him.

“Two dogs” and “bone” come to mind. Ferrari and McLaren would do well not to focus too much on each other.