F1 2025 Australia GP LIVE: Qualifying start time, updates and stream ahead of Hamilton’s Ferrari debut

A big queue at the end of the pit lane, led by Haas’ Esteban Ocon, and we are go with qualifying in 2025!

A reminder: 18 minutes where we will lose the slowest five drivers from the rest of the session…

Who’s your money on, then?

Is it McLaren – with Norris and Piastri both neck-and-neck – or with Ferrari, with Leclerc looking quicker than Hamilton so far?

And don’t discount Max Verstappen, who looked rapid for Red Bull in that final practice!

Qualifying starts in four minutes!

“I’m all good. I’m relaxed, it will be a tight qualifying, tough one ahead, but we’re confident of a strong start.”

So excited for this – the first qualifying session of the new season!

McLaren and Ferrari look to be the favourites for pole, but Max Verstappen and George Russell have also shown excellent speed throughout the three practice sessions.

It’s set to be very tight across the grid!

Nothing has ever motivated Lewis Hamilton more than the naysayers of this world. Where the sceptics see adversity, Hamilton sees opportunity. And last month, the seven-time world champion had a message for the doubters ahead of the most anticipated phase of his glittering Formula One career.

“Don’t ever compare me to anyone else,” he told Time. “I’m the first and only Black driver that’s ever been in this sport. I’m built different… I’m hungry, driven, don’t have a wife or kids. I’m focused on one thing and that’s winning.”

Has the Hamilton-Ferrari hype train caught you yet? If so, what drew you in? Was it the joyous scenes of week one, appearing in a black suit and Ferrari race gear in Maranello for the first time? Was it London, F1 75 Live, and an adoring British crowd? Or was it Bahrain, Milan, and now Melbourne, as the sight of F1’s joint-most successful driver in peerless scarlet red becomes the new reality?

“I feel I’ve joined a team full of motivation, who want to bring the team back to the front. It was a good test in Abu Dhabi.

“We’ve had a strong winter, a positive test, are we going to be one second off the leaders? I don’t know. We want to show progress.

“The pressure I’ve put on myself has been ten times higher than any pressure put upon me.

“I haven’t been made to feel any pressure, I know what I can deliver and it’s just getting my head down.

“No expectations this weekend, getting used to this new car. Ferrari power is new, different vibrations, different feel.”

On one hand, it was pure elation. A member of the McLaren family for eight years, this meant as much to Norris as anyone else. He described it as a “perfect” end to the season, beating Ferrari to the championship by 14 points. And he’d need no invitation; he was going to get “hammered” later that night over the border in Bahrain.

Yet in the same breath, even amid joyous papaya-clad celebrations on the pit-wall, the boy from Bristol could not help but sample that bittersweet taste. “It’s been a special year,” he said over team radio, before adding: “And next year is going to be my year, too.”

The popular F1 docu-series has previously been boycotted by Verstappen, who refused to appear in his first title-winning season, due to Netflix’s tendency to manipulate storylines and drama.

On season seven, a clip of Verstappen’s cool-down room reaction to Lando Norris’s win in Miami is mixed in with his reaction at his home race in Zandvoort in the same scenario, showing a more despondent Verstappen, some three months later.

Lewis Hamilton has admitted that incidents of black footballers being racially abused in Italy did make him think twice when deciding to move to Ferrari this year.

The seven-time F1 world champion has switched to Ferrari after 12 years and six world titles at Mercedes. His first race in Scuderia red is at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on 16 March.

Hamilton is also F1’s first and only black driver and has detailed in the past the “traumatising” racial abuse he has suffered, detailing in 2023 that he had bananas thrown at him and was repeatedly called the “n-word” at school. He was also racially abused at F1 testing in Barcelona in 2008.

Serie A footballers such as Mike Maignan and Moise Kean have been subject to racial abuse in the past and Hamilton did admit that racist chanting at Italian matches “crossed his mind” when making the decision to move to Ferrari last winter.