Melbourne Qualifying: Hamilton on pole but new format flops

Reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton ridiculed any doubts he lost form during his party-filled off season, as he hammered home the fastest lap in qualifying to claim a pole position start for the 2016 Formula 1 world championship season opening Australian Grand Prix.

However it is the failure of the new qualifying format, introduced to spice up the show which will capture the headlines.

The confusing new system was a resounding flop with track action down to the bare minimum and drivers eliminated without being able to set representative lap times. This coupled to a damp squib Q3 is sure to capture the wrath of F1 fans, teams and drivers - watch this space...

When he was on track, Hamilton was the only driver to dip into the 63 seconds zone around Albert Park with his best lap time of 1:23.837, set on his final run enough to annex the top spot start for the 50th time in his career.

"I really have to take my hat off to this team. To raise the bar once more in our third year inspires and motivates me. I enjoyed driving the car today in qualifying. There were some sexy laps, they felt so good, that is all you can hope for as a driver," said Hamilton afterwards

Teammate Nico Rosberg had an error strewn qualifying starting with his first flyer, and simply did not have an answer to his teammate. He had to settle for second place with his final flying lap of the day.

Nevertheless with it he did enough to leapfrog the Ferrari pair of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, who up to that point were the meat in the Mercedes sandwich.

Rosberg said, "The last lap was good in Q3, just Lewis did a better job. It is impressive to see how the team, in the third year running now, appears to be the quickest out there by a good margin. It is amazing to see that. The risk is when you are dominating you start to become complacent but we were able to push through. Of course, not happy with second but lots of opportunities from that position tomorrow."

Oddly, or perhaps not, neither Ferrari driver opted to do a run in the final stages of Q3 and will thus both start from row two, behind the all Silver Arrows front row.

Vettel was 0.8 of a second down on the top time and although he may have gone a tad quicker, had he made another run, it appears that Ferrari are about half a second adrift of Mercedes - in qualifying at least...

The Ferrari driver summed up his afternoon, "I believe we have made a step forward, especially tomorrow we should be closer. We expected Mercedes to be quick in qualifying. I was very happy to set the lap time I did and we decided to save a set of tyres for tomorrow."

"We have high hopes for the race, it’s a long year and the car has a lot of potential. Second row is a good achievement and the team’s been pushing hard," added Vettel.

The new format qualifying hour began with a steady stream of cars flowing onto the circuit from the pit lane as drivers sought to get in a solid lap in advance of the first elimination, which would take place seven minutes into the segment.

And when that came the first out was Manor’s Pascal Wehrlein, followed 90 seconds later by team-mate Rio Haryanto.

The big casualty of the first segment was Red Bull Racing’s Daniil Kvyat. After the Haas cars of Esteban Gutierrez and Romain Grosjean had dropped out, Kvyat appeared to get his timing wrong and with no chance of another flying lap the Russian, who last year qualified 12th, was ruled out in P18.

The final two to be ruled out of Q2 were Sauber’s Felipe Nasr in P17 and team-mate Marcus Ericsson in P16.

The Swede looked like he might scrape through, but Renault’s Jolyon Palmer timed his running well and his final lap won him a Q2 berth at the expense of the Sauber man.

Fifteen drivers went into Q2 in search of eight Q3 slots but the eliminations this time began after six minutes. First out was Renault’s Kevin Magnussen and he was soon followed by Palmer, McLaren’s Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso.

In the unfamiliar environment of the countdown a number of teams were caught out by poor timing and Williams’ Valterri Bottas and Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg and Sergio Pérez were left to retire early to the garage with too little time left to them to start and complete another lap.

Q3 arrived and after five minutes, Daniel Ricciardo was the first to be ruled out, the Aussie unable to replicate the kind of lap that saw him make it through to the final segment in P5. He was followed by Sainz and Williams’ Felipe Massa. Ahead of them was the main mover of the final phase – Verstappen.

The Toro Rosso driver made it through to the final segment in P7 but jumped to P5 in the final classification thanks to an excellent lap of 1:25.434, just four tenths adrift of Räikkönen. The grid slot is the best of the Dutch driver's career to date.

Utlimately though the battle for the top spots was always going to be between Mercedes and Ferrari. Rosberg set the first time and took P1 but wqas quickly beaten by Vettel and then by Hamilton.

With Raikkonen fourth and time running out Ferrari then elected to forego any more running leaving the field clear for Rosberg to challenge Hamilton.

The German couldn’t find the pace necessary and Robserg’s run of pole stretching back to last season’s Japanese Grand Prix was ended by Hamilton.

Note - Haryanto drops three grid places for pit-lane collision with Grosjean in FP3

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