Sakhir, Bahrain - At the start of the season Ferrari and McLaren-Mercedes were widely considered as the teams who would decide the constructor's championship between themselves.

But after Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix, McLaren, Ferrari and BMW- Sauber are involved in a tight three-way race at the top of the standings with BMW leading the way on 30 points.

On Sunday BMW's Robert Kubica followed up his second place finish in Malaysia with a second consecutive podium place after finishing third behind the Ferrari duo of Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen.

A day earlier, Kubica had given his team their first-ever pole and on Sunday Nick Heidfeld's fourth place finish gave BMW their best- ever team result in a Grand Prix.

Team principal Mario Theissen admitted to Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa, that the team was already much further than he anticipated.

"If you had asked me at the beginning at the season, then I would have expected anything but such a strong showing in the three races. We have had a podium finish in each of the three races and have been challenging the top teams."

He says he expects to be able to make an assessment of the team's real strength after the next Grand Prix in Barcelona. "After that race we will have a realistic indication of where we stand.

"I can't say yet that we are better than McLaren, we will see how strong we are after Barcelona. We are certainly looking for a victory and I think we can achieve it this season," he said.

BMW received praise from Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali, who told autosport. com that he expects Kubica to be challenging for the title. "He is a driver who I believe will be in the title fight until the end."

The Italian said that he was confident that Ferrari would continue to be strong. "We must develop the car all the time because we must work in parallel on two fronts: we must keep on working on reliability, because it can create situations difficult to recover from, and on performance, with the search for developments that we must do race-by-race. We want to carry on this way at Barcelona."

He added that he believed McLaren to come back strongly in Barcelona after they failed dismally in Bahrain, where Heikki Kovalainen finished fifth and highly-rated Lewis Hamilton finished outside the top ten after a mistake at the start and crashing into Fernando Alonso.

"I'm convinced McLaren will be back in their usual form," Domenicali said.

The international press though had a field day with Hamilton on Monday, with La Gazzetta dello Sport saying: "Hamilton collapses", while Tuttosport called it "a disaster for Hamilton".

Even British newspapers criticized last year's runner-up, with the Guardian writing: "Lewis Hamilton's title ambitions suffer a huge set-back as he comes home 13th after two huge mistakes." (dpa)