Russell takes Melbourne pole after Verstappen crash

George Russell took an imposing pole position as Mercedes dominated the first qualifying session of a new era of Formula 1 at the Australian Grand Prix.

The Briton led team-mate Kimi Antonelli by 0.363 seconds and was 0.785secs clear of Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar in third place.

Max Verstappen crashed on his first lap to leave a degree of doubt as to the extent of Mercedes’ superiority, but it was an impressive start to a new period of regulations by the former champions.

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was fourth fastest, with the McLarens of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris separating him from his team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

Briton Arvid Lindblad, 18, made an impressive start to his F1 career but a final lap that did not live up the standards he had set until then in the weekend left him behind Racing Bulls team-mate Liam Lawson in ninth place.

Aston Martin, who had been the story of the weekend for all the wrong reasons amid a litany of unreliability, eventually salvaged some respect with Fernando Alonso qualifying 17th.

Russell had looked the most likely to deliver pole all weekend and he was imperious all session.

He said: “A lot of simple things in the past, like race starts and pit stops, are a hell of a lot more challenging with these new cars. I said: ‘Let’s just have a clean session because who knows what’s going to happen to tomorrow.’ But we’re in the best place we can be.”

Antonelli had an incident-packed day, starting with a heavy crash in final practice that left his team working against time to get his car ready for qualifying.

There was also a team error in sending him out for the final session with both cooling fans still in his sidepods.

They fell out at the first corner and one was hit by Norris, leaving the track strewn with debris and causing the session to be stopped.

Frenchman Hadjar said he was surprised to be third, expecting Ferrari to be ahead of him, but on his debut for the Red Bull team he did what so many of his predecessors could not and delivered when Verstappen hit trouble.

The four-time champion spun off and crashed at Turn One on his first lap of the session when his rear axle locked, catching him by surprise.

He was shaking his hands after he climbed out of the car, because he had held on to the steering wheel on impact, but said nothing was broken.

“I have no idea (what happened),” he said. “I just arrived to Turn One and the rear axle just completely locked up out of the blue while hitting the pedal, so this is something very weird that I’ve never experienced in F1 before. So just need to understand what went wrong.”

He will start 20th, ahead only of the Williams of Carlos Sainz and Aston Martin of Lance Stroll, neither of whom were able to take part in the session after reliability problems in final practice.

Behind the Racing Bulls, the new Audi team had a strong session with Gabriel Bortoleto and Nico Hulkenberg taking 10th and 11th places, with the Haas cars of Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon 12th and 13th.

Bortoleto missed a chance to start higher because his car broke down on the way back to the pits after the second knockout session.

Alonso took the opportunity to underline how much difference finally managing to complete some laps had made to a team that were five seconds off the pace on Friday by reducing that to 2.5secs in qualifying.

“The whole winter has been a little bit with that feeling that there is much more to come, especially on the chassis side,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“We feel more or less OK in the corners and we feel we could be in the top 10 easily and then we cannot put laps together in the winter.

“Here, thanks to a more normal second and third practice, we found two seconds easily just because we ran.