Visitors to the London Science Museum can see Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren hanging upside down from the ceiling as part of an exhibition highlighting the use of Formula One technology in the wider world.

If that all seems topsy-turvy, it’s nothing compared to what’s been going on at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya this week.
 
The last big pre-season test involving all the teams before the first race in Australia on March 29 has turned the world on its head for Britain’s two drivers and forced a hasty re-assessment of their prospects.
 
Jenson Button, who last year trundled around in an under-powered Honda that should have been put out of its misery long before it got anywhere near a track, was as bright-eyed as I’ve seen him since he won in Budapest three years ago after his new Brawn turned out to be quite an eye-opener.
 
The Briton completed an impressive 130 laps on Wednesday, lapping comfortably a second faster than anyone else. On Thursday, his Brazilian team mate Rubens Barrichello went even quicker.
 
Not bad for two supposed has-beens whose F1 careers looked as good as over only a few months ago.
 
World champion Hamilton, whose car was the envy of most of his peers in 2008, hit the tyre barriers on Wednesday and ended up last. He was just as slow on Thursday. So not many smiles there.
 
Button scored three points last season to Hamilton’s 98 and had been dismissed by all and sundry. So much so, that Graham Sharpe of bookmakers Williams Hill had another pot shot at him last week when Brawn finally emerged from the remains of now-departed Honda.

“Poor old Jenson - well, rich old Jenson, really - has had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during his as yet unfulfilled career, and now he seems to have done it again,” he declared on his company’s website.
 
“Both he and his team will do really well to win a race this season and he seems doomed to watch Lewis Hamilton going from success to success while his career stagnates.”

Er, maybe not. 
 
McLaren’s astonishing mea culpa on Friday, with team principal Martin Whitmarsh and Mercedes motorsport vice-president Norbert Haug both holding their hands up and recognising that Woking has a problem, offered a reminder that — as sellers of financial products like to remind us — past performance is no guarantee of future success.
 
Brawn have had only a matter of weeks to mesh the Mercedes engine to the ex-Honda chassis but you wouldn’t know it. At this rate, they will be the sensation of the season. Maybe they already are.
 
Pre-season testing can be thoroughly misleading at the best of times, with teams in need of funding sometimes seeking to attract sponsors by running light to look quick. One only has to recall the Prost team’s remarkable testing times in the late 1990s and then look at their less than stellar results.
 
The situation has been further complicated by massive regulation changes, with some teams running with the new KERS energy recovery systems and others without.
 
But the general consensus is that the Brawn performance is not a stunt. Honda devoted last year and a bit more to the new car and rivals are already sounding a little rattled.
 
You’d be mad to write McLaren off, even if you would be hard pushed to find anyone mentioning them in the same breath as the favourites at the moment.
 
They are the most successful team after Ferrari, with 162 wins over the years. But while Ferrari have won eight of the last 10 constructors’ championships and finished in the top three for the past 15 years, McLaren have a bit of a reputation for peaks and troughs.
 
After winning seven races in 2000, they won just eight in the next four seasons.
 
In 2005 they won 10 times and then went through 2006 without a single victory. 

William Hill’s odds on Thursday had Button on 10-1 to win in Australia compared to Hamilton on 15-8. I know who I would take a punt on.

PHOTO: McLaren F1 driver Lewis Hamilton walks to his racing car during a test session at in Barcelona March 12, 2009. REUTERS/Gustau Nacarino