Lewis Hamilton Shows Mercedes' True Speed in 2015 Australian GP Qualifying
So just how fast are Mercedes this year?
That had been the single biggest question mark across the paddock since the 2015 Formula One season sparked into life at the beginning of February, when it became clear the Silver Arrows' main focus across the winter was to eradicate the reliability problems of their title-winning 2014 campaign.
For much of the three pre-season tests in Spain, Lewis Hamilton, the reigning world champion, and Nico Rosberg, his team-mate, seemed content enough to just keep piling on the laps, getting as much mileage on their new toy, the W06 Hybrid, as possible.
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Sure, there were flashes of pace—Rosberg's benchmark time on Day 2 of the final test, for example, sent ripples up and down the pit lane—but for the most part, Mercedes kept their cards close to their chest.
Not so much through secrecy, you understand—or due to the fear of providing their main rivals with a target at which to aim—but because they didn't need to.
Having won all but three races and secured 18 out of a possible 19 pole positions in 2014, Mercedes were never going to cede their advantage over the course of a few months and a winter that brought only minor regulation changes, despite the time sheet-topping exploits of Ferrari in testing.
It was, therefore, always a question of when for Mercedes.
When would they showcase their true speed? When would they illuminate both the track and timing screens? When would they shake the likes of Sebastian Vettel, Fernando Alonso, Daniel Ricciardo and Valtteri Bottas out of their daydreams?
It was generally expected that the moment would come in the third segment of qualifying at the Australian Grand Prix, the first truly serious session of the year, when the engines are turned up to full power, the cars are fitted with the fastest tyres and the drivers are finally let off the leash.
But, in fact, it came slightly earlier than that, with Mercedes blowing the opposition away as soon as Q1.
With fewer than seven minutes remaining in the first part of the hour-long session, Vettel, competing in his first qualifying day for Ferrari, sat proudly atop the time sheets—as he did at various points across the winter—with a time of one minute, 29.307 seconds, as per the FIA television feed, on the soft-compound tyres.
Little more than a minute later, however, the German was relegated to third after Rosberg and Hamilton posted laps of 1:28.906 and 1:28.586 respectively, securing the top-two places by some margin despite using the harder, and theoretically slower, medium tyres.
The fact that Williams' Felipe Massa could only end Q1 seven-tenths adrift of Hamilton's pace-setting time (as per Formula1.com), despite running with the softer tyres—which, according to Pirelli's race preview, are between 1.2 and 1.5 seconds faster than the mediums—underlined the Silver Arrows' superiority.
Such was Mercedes' control of proceedings—Hamilton even left the cockpit for a comfort break with more than four minutes of Q2 to spare, having set another insurmountable time—that the fight for pole position was always bound to be between two drivers.
Yet it proved to be a one-man show as both Hamilton and Rosberg picked up where they left off at the end of 2014.
While Hamilton showed no signs of losing the form which allowed the 30-year-old to win six of the final seven races of his second championship-winning season, driving with a gorgeous mixture of poise and panache, Rosberg made the kind of scruffy errors which saw the 2014 title slip through his fingers.
"The speed was there but I just didn't get it together today," Rosberg told the official FIA press conference after a Q3 session which saw the German ruin his first run by sliding on to the grass run-off area at the penultimate corner before a dire first sector on his final effort left him with no chance of challenging his team-mate for pole.
Despite his lacklustre performance when the pressure was on, Rosberg still managed to qualify second, with his gap of eight-tenths over the third-best time produced by Massa even more startling than Hamilton's advantage of 1.4 seconds (as per Formula1.com) over the Williams.
With Mercedes enjoying such an edge over the rest of the field even when one of the drivers has a relatively poor lap, the championship, if it were ever in doubt, is theirs for the taking once again.
And it's clear that it'll take something special to deny Hamilton, currently in the form of his life, a second Australian Grand Prix victory and, even at this early stage, a third world championship.
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