George Russell will start the Australian Grand Prix, F1’s season opener, from pole with his teammate Kimi Antonelli alongside following a front row Qualifying lock up from the duo Saturday morning in Melbourne.
Antonelli and the no. 12 Mercedes garage were close to starting the season from the back of the grid following a late Fp3 crash Saturday morning, when Antonelli found himself into the wall on the first occurrence of showing the full pace of the 2026 Mercedes, spinning around and ending up in the barrier on the exit of turn two.
The sophomore driver was helped by circumstance when Max Verstappen ended up in the wall midway through Q1, red-flagging the session and adding time to the Mercedes’ engineers’ clock. With his crash, Antonelli was able to put together a time fast enough to advance to the top 16, one more position move into Q2 this year than in the past, with the addition of the 11th team.
In Q3, Russell ultimately put down a time of 0.293 seconds faster than his teammate Antonelli, finally showing the Mercedes speed that has been the talk of the paddock since the early days of 2026 testing.
Verstappen’s new teammate Isack Hadjar was able to muscle the Red Bull into third in qualifying with Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri rounding out the top five.
In the rush to get Antonelli back on track for Q3, the Mercedes team left their cooling fans on, with one flying off into the gravel pits and the other landing on the racing line to be run over by the reigning champion McLaren’s Lando Norris, who will start the Grand Prix from sixth.
Antonelli avoided a grid penalty for the ‘unsafe release’, including the cooling fans, but the team will be hit with a monetary fine for the incident.
Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton qualified one spot behind in seventh. The new Racing Bulls duo of Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad will start eighth and ninth, with Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto rounding out the top ten, after not putting down a time in Q3 following a techinical issues at the end of Q2.
Bortoleto’s teammate, Nico Hulkenberg, leads the rest of the field, followed by the Haas of Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon, the Alpine of Pierre Gasly, Williams of Alex Albon, and Alpine of Franco Colapinto, being the drivers to qualify out of Q1.
The back of the field, knocked out in Q1, is led by Aston Martin’s Franando Alonso, followed by the Cadillacs of Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas. Verstappen will start 20th with neither Carlos Sainz nor Lance Stroll putting down a qualifying lap following their damage in Saturday’s Free Practice session.
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Victoria Beaver is a nomadic sports writer who spends her time hopping between race tracks and hippie farms. She’s covered every corner of motorsports that will let her in from 410 Sprints to NASCAR to Supercross. Her daily driver is a 2010 Subaru that she refused to do the smallest amount of preventative maintenance on. Instead, she spends her free time and money building a 42-foot Skoolie to one day travel the country full time.