2018 F1 Australian GP: Hamilton takes the first pole of the year

As every new season, F1 introduces innovations, and the most notable one for 2018 is the safety system known as the halo, which we now see on all the single-seaters. What hasn’t changed in recent years is seeing Lewis Hamilton taking poles, and he has now reached 73 for the British driver after the one he has achieved in qualifying for the Australian GP.

Rain was expected on Saturday and it did accompany the drivers during Free Practice 3, but in the time between practice and qualifying the clouds cleared away, the sun came out and dried the track. As a result, there was no room for surprises, and the times were as expected during Friday’s practice sessions, which were also dry.

Fernando Alonso, who would surely have preferred wet conditions, was a tenth of a second short of making it through to Q3, which started with an accident involving Valtteri Bottas that left the Finn without a time to set and in tenth place. Carlos Sainz did make it through to Q2, finishing as the seventh-fastest, but in Q3 he was beaten by the two Haas drivers, Magnussen and Grosjean, who from the outset are the first surprise of the championship.

There was no surprise in the fight for the top spot. It seemed that the Ferrari and the Red Bulls were capable of denying Hamilton pole, since their times up to that point had been very close, but in Q3 the Briton unleashed the full potential of his Mercedes and left the Ferrari more than half a second behind, with Raikkonen ahead of Vettel, seven tenths behind Verstappen and almost a second behind Ricciardo.

The times from the whole qualifying session and the final starting grid are as follows:

And at the press conference, Hamilton brought out the “knives” against Vettel, noting that he had not saved any special engine map for Q3 and that until then he had been hiding his cards, so that in Q3 his rivals’ smiles would be wiped away. Without a doubt, tomorrow’s race will get off to a heated start.

After his fifth consecutive pole position in Australia, the British driver is the big favourite to win at Albert Park and start 2018 at the top of the podium. Remember that the race starts at around 7:00 in the morning in Spain, so you’ll have to get up early to watch the outcome of the first Grand Prix of the 2018 Formula 1 season.