F1 Australia Grand Prix 2025: Date, UK start time, grid positions and how to watch race

McLaren locked up the front row in Melbourne for Sunday’s F1 Australian Grand Prix, having dominated its rivals, including Red Bull, Mercedes, and Ferrari — whose drivers, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, will start from seventh and eighth on the grid.

Lando Norris set a searing final qualifying lap to secure pole position, his first at Melbourne’s Albert Park, and milestone 10th overall, in front of his teammate Oscar Piastri, and a record Saturday crowd of 136,347 at Albert Park.

“Not a bad way to start the year, thanks everyone,” Norris said on his team radio shortly after the qualifying session ended ahead of Sunday’s opening race of the Formula 1 season.

Norris went into Q3 on the back foot after his first lap was deleted for a track limit infringement at turn four, where he put all four wheels off the track. But he delivered when it mattered with his one run.

“It’s a tough one, because you want to take a lot of risks, especially on this track,” Norris said. “It’s a track where you’ve got to commit and you’ve got to know you know what your target is and once you’ve turned in, you’re kind of hoping for the best in a lot of cases.

“Obviously I took too many of my first (Q3) lap and got track limits, so I was in a difficult position with knowing how much risk I wanted to take, but I put it together well.”

And the Brit is confident he can maintain that form in the race.

“I think we were decent in Bahrain, and I think we’re going to be pretty good here,” Norris said. “We were pretty good here last year and that was with a much worse car, so we’re going in with one target clearly, which is to have two cars at the top.”

Piastri was not unhappy to be second, having maximixed his lap, which enabled McLaren to lock out the front row for the second straight race, following 2024’s season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. But the Australian hasn’t given up on becoming the first Australian to win his home F1 Grand Prix.