'No Hamilton fairytale as Norris and McLaren deliver on potential'

Australian Grand Prix

Venue: Albert Park, Melbourne Date: Sunday, 16 March Race start: 04:00 GMT

Coverage: Live commentary on BBC Radio 5 Live from 03:30. Live text updates on BBC Sport website and app

There was no fairytale for Lewis Hamilton on his first competitive outing, as Formula 1's most celebrated driver began his career with the sport's most iconic team.

The seven-time world champion qualified only eighth for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix - one place and 0.218 seconds slower than his Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc, and a whopping 0.877secs behind Lando Norris' McLaren on pole position.

Afterwards, Hamilton was repeating the mantra he has been using for some time - that it is going to take a little time before he is fully up to speed with his new car and team.

"For me, just improving every single lap, session on session," he said. "Big learning curve this weekend.

"The car was so much different than I have ever experienced here and it's been a lot slower process to build confidence in the car.

"In the high-speed [corners], I have been down all weekend to Charles, who has had confidence from the get-go. He knew what the car does. I was just building up to that. I got a lot closer in the end and to be that close to Charles in my first qualifying session against a great qualifier..."

He didn't complete the sentence, but the meaning was clear - Leclerc is blindingly fast; everyone knows that. So from Hamilton's point of view, in terms of his own relative performance, this was a perfectly decent start.

The same could not be said of Ferrari themselves. Hamilton is at Ferrari with one objective only - to win an eighth world title. Leclerc himself spoke on Thursday about winning a championship with Ferrari being his "obsession". Neither will achieve their aims with a car that qualifies on the fourth row of the grid.

Leclerc was perplexed by what had happened. He had been quick all weekend, and fourth fastest in the first qualifying session, just over 0.1secs off Norris, who topped all three. But it became progressively worse as the hour developed.

"As soon as we started to push the car more and more," Leclerc said, "we found more and more inconsistency, which was a bit of a shame.

"We lost the pace a little bit through qualifying. In Q1 we were good, in Q2 we were less good and in Q3 we had to push a lot to try and nail the lap time. We didn't really follow the track for some reason.

"This car has a lot of potential but for now we don't seem to be in the right window, so we have to find it."

It was a sobering start to a season that all in F1 had expected to start with Ferrari as McLaren's closest challenger. But not everyone felt it was necessarily a reflection of the team's true potential.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said: "I am certainly surprised at the gap between McLaren and Ferrari. But I would say more, I just don't take that gap at face value.

"I'm sure the potential of the red car is higher than for some reasons was possible to exploit today. I think we have seen that until possibly qualifying in every single session, even in Bahrain [at pre-season testing].

"So we are very realistic that Ferrari is definitely one of the main contenders."

Hamilton at Ferrari - his personal quest for success, and the internal battle with Leclerc - is one of the dominant narratives at the start of this season.

Another is whether Norris can deliver on his ambition to mount a season-long title challenge from the off, rather than having to play catch-up - which he had to try to do last year because McLaren did not start on Red Bull's level.

In the end in Melbourne, McLaren did deliver on their potential, but not without a few scary moments.

Facing a tougher challenge from Red Bull and Max Verstappen than they - and the four-time champion himself - had expected, Norris and Oscar Piastri both made mistakes on their first laps in the final part of qualifying.

That put them under pressure on their last runs - lacking a competitive first lap always makes finding the right balance of risk and reward on that all-important final lap much more difficult, because the penalty of making a mistake is so much greater.

For home favourite Piastri, this was bad enough - he was fourth after his first run. Norris, though, was 10th, having had his lap deleted for exceeding track limits.

Both absolutely nailed it. Piastri, hoping to become the first Australian to win his home grand prix in F1, improved by a second, knocking Verstappen from the top, and Norris did even better, pipping his team-mate by 0.084secs.

Norris said. "It's a track where you've got to commit. You know what your target is, and once you turn in you're kind of hoping for the best in a lot of cases. You want to take those risks.

"Obviously, I took too many on my first lap and got track limits, so I was in a difficult position knowing how much risk I wanted to take. But I put it together well. It was just a clean lap, no mistakes, and that was enough. So happy. A perfect way to start the season."

McLaren ended last year with their first constructors' championship title for 26 years, and Stella has said they have taken some risks with "innovative" design in pushing for more performance from a car that was the fastest in the field for the second half of last year.

Although all the teams arrived in Melbourne expecting them to be at the front, Norris on Thursday described the idea they might be a chunk ahead of the rest as "short-sighted".

In the end, at least on the quick, demanding street circuit of Albert Park, he was the one who had to recalibrate.

"It really was not necessarily our expectation to have a bit of a gap to the rest of the cars," Norris said, before pointing to the fact that the errors they made were due to the difficulty in nailing a lap in a car that has taken the team to new heights.

"The car is extremely quick. And when you put it together, it's unbelievable. It's just difficult to put it together. So really it was like a little fight between me and Oscar today, and it was a tough one."

Verstappen might have been pleasantly surprised to be best of the rest, but the 0.385secs margin between him and Norris, while perhaps expected, will have been less palatable.

For his team, though, there are concerns on more than one level. On top of the apparent gap to McLaren, there was the performance of their new recruit Liam Lawson.

After paying off Sergio Perez to leave just seven months after being given a new two-year contract, the last thing Red Bull will have wanted to see was Lawson more than 0.6secs off Verstappen on the first day's practice.

Lawson was then hit with an engine problem that robbed him of the entire final session on Saturday. In that context, it was no surprise that he should struggle in qualifying.

Even so, a first lap a second off Verstappen, and a mistake on his second - putting him on to the grass and down in 18th on the grid - was not a good start.

Lawson is two places behind 18-year-old Italian Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Hamilton's replacement at Mercedes. Antonelli, who will become the third youngest driver to start an F1 race on Sunday, had his qualifying compromised by damage to the floor of his car. The other Mercedes of George Russell will start alongside Verstappen in fourth.

There was an impressive performance from another rookie, Gabriel Bortoleto in the Sauber, a bad start to his first full season for Haas' British novice Oliver Bearman, and promise from Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin that was not delivered when an off in the second session damaged his floor.

Many would want a straightforward first race of the season. But Albert Park has a habit of throwing up curveballs, and it seems the weather may oblige on Sunday, with rain predicted.

"It's a new car," Norris said. "So there are a lot of unknowns and question marks about how it will perform. It's not always as simple as just putting on wets and having a crack.

"A bit of our pace potentially goes out of the window because it's harder to extract and show the difference of pace we had today. But we're in the best position to do that if we can. I know the chances of rain have been going down, but normally wet races and inter races are pretty exciting."

What he did not mention is that the rain brings Verstappen - who would not expect to match the McLarens in a dry race - right into the picture.

Stella was less reticent.

"The only thing I can say about Max in the wet is that he is mega," he said. "He can be a significant threat."

Hamilton, too, has made a reputation for being special when it rains. But his circumstances mean he will not be treating it with the usual smile.

"The wet has often been something I have enjoyed," Hamilton said. "So it's a comfort zone for me but I am going out for the first time in the wet in an uncomfortable position because I have never driven this car.

"It is going to be a shock to the system when I first get out there, but I will be learning on the fly and giving it everything."