Red Bull’s Max Verstappen took pole position for the Australian Grand Prix ahead of the Mercedes of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
Verstappen beat Russell by 0.236 seconds as Mercedes had their best qualifying of the season. Hamilton was 0.136secs further adrift in third.
Fernando Alonso was fourth in the Aston Martin ahead of Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.
Sergio Perez crashed the second Red Bull on his first lap of qualifying and will start the race at the back.
It is a major blow to the Mexican, who is just one point behind Verstappen in the championship after his victory in the last race in Saudi Arabia and who started the weekend saying he had confidence he had Red Bull’s backing to challenge his team-mate.
Regardless of how the Australian Grand Prix plays out, Formula One will leave Melbourne having to consider Max Verstappen’s threat to quit the sport because of its continued determination to hold sprint races.
Having secured pole at Albert Park, the world champion, who has previously expressed his dissatisfaction with the sprint race format, was blunt in stating it was not in the DNA of the sport and that F1 was not going about improving race weekends the right way.
The sport is considering changing the format such that the GP grid is decided by Friday qualifying but then a second qualifying session is held on Saturday morning to make up the grid for the sprint, with the shortened race then becoming a standalone event.
On Friday the Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, had already weighed in on the subject, stating it was “ludicrous” to hold a sprint race at the next round in Baku, on a high-speed street circuit where the chances of major damage was high should a car go off.
Verstappen, the winner of the last two world championships for Red Bull, was dismissive of the concept as a whole and any further expansion of it in the calendar, to the extent he warned that it may precipitate him leaving the sport.
Even if you change the format, I don’t find that is in the DNA of Formula One to do these kind of sprint races,” he said. “I hope there won’t be too many changes, otherwise I won’t be around for too long.
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“I am not a fan of it at all. When we do all that kind of stuff, the weekend becomes very intense and we already do a lot of races. But it is not the right way to go about it. I understand they want to make every at the track day exciting but they should reduce the weekend, and only race on Saturday and Sunday and make those two days exciting.”
Formula One is very much in favour of the sprint format, which it has deemed to be a success. Certainly it goes down well with promoters, who gain an additional competitive session on a Friday, but fans have been less enamoured, with many of the races being lights-to-flag processions.
They lack jeopardy or risk-taking by drivers unwilling to take chances of suffering damage before Sunday’s GP. They also sit as part of an increasingly long season, this year of 23 races, a further factor that has attracted Verstappen’s ire.
