Hamilton takes first pole of 2015

Lewis Hamilton has taken pole position for the 2015 Australian Grand Prix over team mate Nico Rosberg after being fastest in all three segments of qualifying.The session was a case of Mercedes domination out front and then everybody else. Felipe Massa was the fastest of the non factory Mercedes cars in third position almost 1.5 seconds behind Hamilton. Sebastian Vettel qualified fourth on his debut for Ferrari and Kimi Raikkonen rounded out the top five.

Massa's Williams team mate Valtteri Bottas qualified sixth after a difficult Q3 cost him a better position. In his final lap he went slightly wide in the final corner which possibly could have cost him a position or two.

Red Bull had a disappointing session as Daniel Ricciardo could only manage to qualify in seventh place and Daniil Kvyat did not manage to make Q3. Kvyat had an engine problem in practice and missed most of that session and did not appear until the dying moments of Q1 when he managed to breakthrough into the next round.

Red Bull's sister team had a much better day as they probably did not expect to get either driver in Q3. Carlos Sainz qualified in eighth position after a strong run and Max Verstappen managed twelfth place after having a moment in turn six of his final Q2 lap.

Lotus looks to be in a much better place than they were last year as both Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado broke into the final session where Grosjean qualified ninth and Maldonado tenth despite being almost a second behind his team mate.

Sauber almost got a surprise when Felipe Nasr nearly broke into Q3 but he was knocked out in the final seconds into 11th position. 11th is probably much better than the team expected heading into the session though. The other Sauber driver of Marcus Ericsson qualified 16th and was unable to make it out of Q1.

Force India had a fairly quiet session as Nico Hulkenberg qualified 14th and Sergio Perez 15th as the two drivers were just one-thousandth of a second apart from each other.

The McLaren team had a disastrous day as the will occupy the last row of the grid with its new Honda engine. This is the first time neither McLaren got out of Q1 since the 2009 Brazilian Grand Prix. McLaren will probably be looking just to finish tomorrow and learn gather more data for the future.

The Manor team did not get out in qualifying so they will not start the race and just 18 cars will be on the grid

Qualifying Times

Driver	Car	Time
Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	1m26.327s
Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	1m26.921s
Felipe Massa	Williams-Mercedes	1m27.718s
Sebastian Vettel	Ferrari	1m27.757s
Kimi Raikkonen	Ferrari	1m27.790s
Valtteri Bottas	Williams-Mercedes	1m28.087s
Daniel Ricciardo	Red Bull-Renault	1m28.329s
Carlos Sainz Jr.	Toro Rosso-Renault	1m28.510s
Romain Grosjean	Lotus-Mercedes	1m28.560s
Pastor Maldonado	Lotus-Mercedes	1m29.480s
Felipe Nasr	Sauber-Ferrari	1m28.800s
Max Verstappen	Toro Rosso-Renault	1m28.868s
Daniil Kvyat	Red Bull-Renault	1m29.070s
Nico Hulkenberg	Force India-Mercedes	1m29.208s
Sergio Perez	Force India-Mercedes	1m29.209s
Marcus Ericsson	Sauber-Ferrari	1m31.376s
Jenson Button	McLaren-Honda	1m31.422s
Kevin Magnussen	McLaren-Honda	1m32.037s