Hamilton takes 50th pole in Australia
Lewis Hamilton takes his 50th pole position in comfortable fashion after controversial new qualifying system leaves no cars out for the final four minutes. Team-mate Nico Rosberg took second place, with both Ferraris placed behind him.
Quotes from the session:
Lewis Hamilton: "We said at the beginning it wasn't the right way, we can't knock it before we've tried it, but the engineers were right."
Nico Rosberg: "It's good that F1 tries, but we should go back to the old system."
Sebastian Vettel: "I don't see the point why everyone is surprised - we said what is going to happen and it's happened. It's not very exciting."
Christian Horner, Red Bull: "First of all, we should apologise, the intentions were well meant but we have got it wrong. We need to address it immediately. What we saw today wasn't good for Formula 1."
Toto Wolff, Mercedes: "The new qualifying format's pretty rubbish. We haven't improved the show, we've made it worse"
| Pos | Name | Time/Q |
| 1 | Lewis Hamilton | 1:23.837 - Q3 |
| 2 | Nico Rosberg | 1:24.197 - Q3 |
| 3 | Sebastian Vettel | 1:24.675 - Q3 |
| 4 | Kimi Raikkonen | 1:25.033 - Q3 |
| 5 | Max Verstappen | 1:25.434 - Q3 |
| 6 | Felipe Massa | 1:25.458 - Q3 |
| 7 | Carlos Sainz | 1:25.582 - Q3 |
| 8 | Daniel Ricciardo | 1:25.589 - Q3 |
| 9 | Sergio Perez | 1:25.753 - Q2 |
| 10 | Nico Hulkenberg | 1:25.865 - Q2 |
