Australian Grand Prix qualifying

Posted by Jamie Hibbard at 9:30AM on Saturday 15 March, 2008 1 Comment

Webber crashed out of quali The first F1 qualifying of the year has just finished, and wasn't it worth the wait? I wasn't at Melbourne as much as you guys weren't, but hell I enjoyed watching it.

Lewis Hamilton's eyes said it all when they cut to him sitting in the garage, as presumably the piece of paper that he'd been handed had something like 'Kimi's out' written on it. Lewis certainly had the twinkle of someone who knew he was about to stick his silver car on the number one spot, thanks to Raikkonen's fuel regulator problems that put the Finn out of qualifying.

With Lewis' team mate Heikki Kovalainen getting third, the McLaren boys are going to be a hard pair to beat in tomorrow's race.

But Robert Kubica! Wow, what a great job he did, even with that scary tail out moment that he had near the end of his flying lap. If it wasn't for that, the tabloids would be going crazy in the morning with 'there's a Pole on pole' type headlines. He convincingly beat his team mate Nick Heidfeld too, who was down in 5th, just behind the other Ferrari of Felipe Massa.

Jarno Trulli had a seemingly quiet final quali lap get himself into 6th, which added to team mate Timo Glock's 9th would lead us to believe that Toyota at least have something of a competitive car for the beginning of the season. Although that might not now help Glock, who got demoted 5 spots for gearbox fettling and then another 5 for yellow flag infringements. But that said the Japanese team could find themselves having a fairly strong weekend, as long as the 'flying lap specialist' Trulli isn't just that.

Nico Rosberg and David Coulthard are in 7th and 8th respectively, with hot youngster Sebastian Vettel driving brilliantly to put his Torro Rosso in 9th. Well, I say that, but his car barely left the garage in Q3, as STR decided they'd be better off saving fuel for the race rather than trying to get higher up the grid.

I have a feeling we'll see a lot more of this from the mid-field teams due to the new quail rules this season, now that they have to start tomorrow's race with whatever fuel they have onboard at the end of today. Therefore, Vettel can likely run longer than the top placed boys who used a large amount of fuel doing their qualifying runs. He made a spot up though, thanks to Glock's demotion.

The final bit of big news is that Fernando Alonso didn't even get his Renault into the final session of qualifying this morning, which must be very frustrating for him...

And now for some random observations:

Vijay Mallya is cool and the Force Indias look great in their retro 70s colours.

I like the new barcode logo on the Ferraris.

The Williams look great.

It's good to see Ross Brawn back on the pit lane, and he already seems to be making a difference at Honda, helping Rubens Barrichello to 10th.

Can't wait for tomorrow.