LIVE: Spanish Grand Prix Qualifying

Follow live coverage of qualifying at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya for the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix with F1i.

It's a bright and sunny afternoon, ideal conditions for the teams and drivers to show exactly what they can do. Will it be a Mercedes front row again, or do Ferrari and Red Bull finally have a chance to crashing the party?

LIVE: Spanish Grand Prix - Qualifying

Nico Rosberg was fastest of anyone on Friday and then shaved another nine tenths of a second off that time on Saturday morning in the final free practice session despite a brief scare with an engine sensor issue. His team mate Lewis Hamilton was in second just 0.126s but doesn't look entirely comfortable with his car's handling at the moment especially in the final sector, so pole position might not be within his reach today unless he can pull something spectacular out of the bag.

And for once, the matter of pole position might not be a private Mercedes in-house affair this weekend because Ferrari are looking tantalisingly close. Sebastian Vettel was only 0.147s away from matching Rosberg, and Kimi Raikkonen could easily have been right in the thick of it as well if not for hitting traffic in his final flying lap of the morning.

As if that's not enough, don't discount the Red Bull cars who ended FP3 in fifth and sixth. And more impressively it was the team new boy Max Verstappen who ended up top in that team battle, just under a tenth faster than his more experienced team mate Daniel Ricciardo. Not bad for his first weekend in the car after being swapped with Daniil Kvyat, who is shuffled back to Toro Rosso giving him a lot to prove this weekend.

With the exception of that brief sensor glitch for Rosberg, FP3 was a pretty quiet affair with no big dramas other than an on-track spat between Renault's Kevin Magnussen and Haas F1's Romain Grosjean. It looks like everyone should be in robust form for qualifying, which gets underway at 2pm local time (1pm BST).

Naturally you can rely on F1i to being you all the up-to-the-minute news, analysis and insight from all three rounds of qualifying as it happens here on F1i's live page, which has been upgraded for an even better user experience.

FP3 REPORT: Rosberg, Hamilton and Vettel split by 0.147s

Drivers react to Red Bull seat swap

Romain Grosjean column: Spain will show the real Haas

Chris Medland's 2016 Spanish Grand Prix preview

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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.