Hamilton surprised by qualifying dominance in Melbourne

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Lewis Hamilton admitted surprise that Mercedes had proved to be so much faster than the rest of the field in Saturday's qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix.

Hamilton secured yet another Melbourne pole - his sixth in a row - with a time of 1:20.486s, a new track record which was just 0.112s quicker than his team mate Valtteri Bottas but a hefty seven tenths faster than Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel.

That's a huge turnaround from the situation in pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya where it appeared that Ferrari were well ahead of the rest and that Mercedes were struggling for performance.

Emphatic Aussie front-row lock-out for Hamilton and Bottas!

Even when Mercedes took control of Friday's free practice session, most assumed it was because Ferrari and the other teams were 'sandbagging' and hiding their true form.

But Saturday's session was the ultimate proof that this wasn't the case and that once again the reigning world champions hold the whip hand over their rivals at the outset.

"It was a real shock," Hamilton confessed when asked about Mercedes' dominance. "This couldn’t be a better way to start the year.

"Valtteri was doing some incredible laps out there so I had to pull out something special at the end to stay ahead.

"Yesterday Ferrari were with us. We were heavy on fuel, and then when we dropped fuel we were on par in terms of performance. Then all of a sudden they lost some performance this morning, which is not what I was expecting.

"It’s a difficult circuit and it’s dusty, it could be a number of things," he added when asked what he thought had made the difference.

"[After testing] we went back to factory, knew we had work to do,” he continued. "We had a decent package to work with, but [I was] aware we were behind. They showed us the summary of how testing went, we were behind Ferrari.

"From then until now, we haven’t changed the car, [but] we’ve understood the car more," he added. "We haven’t brought upgrades, but as I said, the last couple of days we felt good at the track.

"I’m grateful where our car is, but I know Ferrari will be pushing hard and progressing in the coming days.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.