No Hamilton fairytale as Norris and McLaren deliver on potential'

 There was no fairytale for Lewis Hamilton on his first competitive outing for Ferrari, 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 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."

Norris and Piastri 'nail' final laps after mistakes

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."