Australian Grand Prix: George Russell takes Melbourne pole after Max Verstappen crash
Frenchman Hadjar said he was surprised to finish third as he expected Ferrari to be ahead of him, but in his debut with the Red Bull team he did what many of his predecessors could not do and did so when Verstappen had problems.
The four-time champion crashed on the first lap of the session when his rear axle locked up at turn one, catching him off guard.
His hands were shaking after he got out of the car because he was holding on to the steering wheel at the moment of impact, but he said nothing was broken.
“I have no idea (what happened),” he said. “I just came into turn one and as I was pressing the pedal the rear axle suddenly locked up completely, which is a very strange thing that I’ve never experienced in F1 before. So I need to figure out what went wrong.”
It will start from 20th place, ahead of Williams with Carlos Sainz and Aston Martin with Lance Stroll, who could not participate in the session due to durability problems in recent practice.
Behind the Racing Bulls, the new Audi team put in a strong performance with Gabriel Bortoleto and Nico Hulkenberg finishing 10th and 11th, with Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon finishing 12th and 13th in their Haas cars.
Bortoleto missed the chance to start higher when his car broke down while returning to the pits after the second qualifying session.
Alonso took the opportunity to underline how much of a difference it made to finally complete some laps by reducing that time to 2.5 seconds in qualifying for a team that had trailed by five seconds on Friday.
“The whole winter has been a feeling of more to come, especially on the chassis side,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live. he said.
“We feel more or less good in the corners and think we can get into the top 10 easily, but we can’t put together laps in the winter.”
“Thanks to a more normal second and third practice here, we found two seconds easy just because we were running.
“The point is to keep touring and staying united. It’s no secret that the main problem is the PU (power unit). We are lacking in power and reliability. We didn’t do a lot of touring in the winter and now we’re short on batteries, we can’t do a lot of touring or we’re missing parts. We need to fix the power units and Aston Martin is trying to help as much as possible with Honda.”
