Lewis Hamilton leads the way as rivals accuse Mercedes of sandbagging and underplaying significance of compression ratio advantage.

Having clearly not received the memo from Stefano Domenicali, world champions Max Verstappen and Lando Norris remain unimpressed by the new generation of cars.

Today's post-qualifying press conference with George Russell, Kimi Antonelli and Isack Hadjar.

It was a tremendously encouraging qualifying session for the team, and seeing Gabi reach Q3 is a special moment for everyone involved.

What happened to Max is obviously very unfortunate and the most important thing is that he is okay. At the moment we are still trying to fully understand what happened.

We have said all along that we would measure ourselves by how we execute and operate as a team and we did that really well today.

Based on performance analysis and the condition of the sets at the end of the sessions, all three compounds could play a role in tomorrow's race strategies.

The main takeaway from today is that we need to do some work to generate more power and extract more performance from the power unit.

What is clear is that today the gap to Mercedes is significant and we will have to make progress to get closer to them.

George Russell took pole position with Kimi Antonelli second as the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team locked out the front-row at the season-opening Melbourne Grand Prix.

Pierre Gasly: "I think we are all disappointed by the end result today and we certainly expected much more.

Tim Goss: "An excellent day for VCARB and Red Bull Ford Powertrains today in Qualifying.