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Conclusions from Australian GP Qualifying: What we learnt

The battle of the world champs the world has been waiting for may finally be here, Red Bull left behind, Alonso's genius flatters McLaren

The chasm is now just a gap: We have a race on
It's all about margins. A year ago, it was a chasm: Mercedes were eight tenths clear of Ferrari in qualifying at Australia - a gap too large for any realistic prospect of complete closure before the season's end. But a year on, the gap has closed to within touching distance. Less than three tenths? Game on.

A few important caveats still apply: Three tenths of a second is still a large amount of time in a sport which measures in blinks of the eye; Lewis Hamilton appears to be at the peak of his powers and remains the clear favourite to prevail; And for Kimi Raikkonen the gap is still a chasm of eight tenths.

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Paul di Resta is at the SkyPad to look at the difference between Lewis Hamilton's Australian pole laps in 2016 and 2017

But Ferrari have something to play with and something to believe in.

Tellingly, the team were disappointed rather than relieved with Saturday's outcome. The words and demeanor of team boss Maurizio Arrivabene were of a man not content with feeding off Mercedes' scraps: "When you smell the food you want to eat it," the Ferrari chief told Sky F1 with the line of the day.

And Mercedes know they have a battle on their hands. "It's going to be close," Hamilton told Sky F1. "Already the Ferraris are very, very close with us."

More specifically, it's looking close between Mercedes and Ferrari's leading men.

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At long last, the head-to-head battle between Vettel and Hamilton, the battle of the world champions which the F1 world has been waiting for, may finally be here.

But Red Bull have been left behind
So much for the hope that Red Bull were sandbagging in winter testing and were holding plenty back for Melbourne.

The brutal reality exposed in qualifying is that the third member of the 'big three' has been left behind at the start of 2017.

Despite its simplified, minimalist design, the new Red Bull car seems particularly sensitive to set-up changes and potentially inconsistent. "That car is on a knife-edge," concluded David Croft after Daniel Ricciardo - a rare culprit of errors - spun out of qualifying.

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Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo crashes in qualifying for the Australian GP

Max Verstappen at least kept the RB13 on the road but finished qualifying a mammoth 1.3 seconds shy of Hamilton's benchmark before offering a damning assessment of his new car:

"All the time when we were changing something it was changing quite a lot, in terms of oversteer or understeer, and basically not having the pace," he said. "We are still down on power but also, in terms of grip level and things, we are not on the same level compared to Ferrari and Mercedes yet."

Even genius can't hide McLaren's problems
It is, once again, a sobering reflection on just how far McLaren have fallen since reuniting with Honda that after finishing 13th and 18th in qualifying, their post-event press release was headlined 'Better than expected'.

While the car - and more specifically, the engine - has been far more reliable this weekend than it was in testing, saving the team from further embarrassment, their respectability in the pecking order was almost entirely dependent on the unrelenting brilliance of Fernando Alonso.

The genius is his, the tragedy of his talents going to waste is the sport's shame.

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As has become the norm, Fernando could have done no more. Nobody could. Team boss Eric Boullier said the Spaniard had produced the "perfect lap" - and even then it was only good enough for 13th. "But in truth that's all our car is capable of delivering at the moment," accepted Boullier, "and Fernando produced it all. Bravo."

Stoffel Vandoorne was a second behind Alonso in Q1 and 1.4 seconds down once Alonso improved again during Q2. There was no shame in that for the young Belgian - hindered at the start of qualifying by a fuel-pressure issue, he probably did well to qualify anywhere other than last.

Right now, given his inexperience, the calibre of his team-mate, and the problems of his team, Vandoorne has the least enviable task of any driver on the grid.

Risk and reward in the battle to be best of the rest
Few would predicted after winter testing that Haas would be the fourth-quickest team in qualifying at Australia and fewer still when the cars of Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen seemed to spend as much time in Friday practice in the gravel as they did on the road.

All of which made Grosjean's rise to prominence in qualifying, reaching the heady heights of sixth after Ricciardo's crash, all the more remarkable - and potentially misleading.

How much was due to car and how much to driver? Judging by Magnussen's elimination in Q1, more of the latter than former. Grosjean is a vastly underrated talent and the battle to be the best of the rest is very likely to ebb and flow from race to race, session to session.

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When's the Australian GP on Sky?

Lights out for the 2017 season curtain-raiser at 6am on Sunday March 26

A note of caution also applies to Toro Rosso for whom both Carlos Sainz and Daniil Kvyat reached the top ten. The team are something of Albert Park specialists: Sainz also qualified eighth for the 2015 season-opener and both of their cars were in the top seven twelve months ago, but in nether campaign were they able to maintain that level of performance.

And what's the story at the back of the grid? Perhaps it's simply that the back of the midfield is the back. True, Sauber, the expected solitary backmarkers, may have been flattered by the problems of Jolyon Palmer and Lance Stroll, but the fact of the matter is that Q1 ended with a Sauber progressing to Q2 and four other teams in the drop zone - Haas, McLaren, Williams and Renault.

No room for error, plenty of reward for driver performance? Amen to that.

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The final word on Qualy: Ted's Notebook!
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