When Lewis Hamilton announced his decision to leave McLaren for Mercedes at the tail end of last season, it really was a huge risk.

Walking away from the team he had joined as a teenager to land a race seat at a struggling Mercedes outfit was a dangerous move at this juncture of his career.

Prior to the start of this season, the general impression was that Mercedes would be setting their sights on 2014 when Formula 1 moves from V10 engines to V8s, which would leave 2013 as a transitional period.

But judging from pre-season and the opening Grand Prix, the Mercedes F1 W04 is not as far away as expected when it comes to pace and could put Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in contention for race wins this season. In fact, both drivers posted some of the fastest times in February.

Hamilton managed to finish a solid fifth in Melbourne last weekend, although there will be concerns over tyre wear – an increasingly decisive factor in the sport over the past few seasons.

And he followed that up with Mercedes' first podium of the new season with a third place finish in Malaysia, having qualified fourth.

But any minor concerns will be tempered by the fact that his former team is struggling. McLaren have redesigned their package for 2013 and initially started pre-season in encouraging fashion.

But as the winter tests wore on it became increasingly apparent that the Woking outfit were well off the pace of the top teams.

And that was confirmed at the Australian Grand Prix as Jenson Button and new No 2 Sergio Perez qualified 10^th and 15^th respectively. Their race pace was not much better as Button moved up to ninth and 11^th. After the race, team principal Martin Whitmarsh suggested that the team might need to go back to the drawing board. It mirrors Ferrari’s issues in the early part of last season – Fernando Alonso’s heroics notwithstanding – which gives the design team some hope that they can bring in effective developments as the season wears on.

McLaren's performance improved somewhat in Malaysia today but Button was forced to retire from a points-scoring position, and Perez ended up ninth.

Whether Hamilton’s Mercedes move works out in the long-term is still a moot point. But leaving McLaren seems to have been a wise move in the short-term which suggests that the 2008 World Champion also had some forewarning the team’s issues.

The anticipated move of McLaren’s top engineer Paddy Lowe to Mercedes also adds more intrigue to the situation.