Shovlin after disappointing qualifying by Mercedes: 'We'll be alert'

Mercedes will have to make do in the race with starting positions P7 for George Russell and P11 for Lewis Hamilton. The seven-time world champion had to acknowledge his superiority to his compatriot. Hamilton even struggled to survive Q1, he said. Mercedes chief Andrew Shovlin also sees the team's disappointing results.

Yet during FP3, things didn't go too badly at all for Hamilton and Russell's team. "It felt like we'd made good progress overnight and the car was working well across FP3 this morning. However, that pace didn't seem to carry into qualifying and we finished a disappointing P7 and P11. The track was a little hotter and it was a little windier in qualifying, but that does not fully explain why the car was well behaved in one session and such a handful the next. The work to understand those issues will carry on in the background as we turn our focus to the race," Mercedes' Trackside Engineering Director said after qualifying.

Qualifying challenges

The starting positions for Russell and Hamilton are far from ideal to score many points in the Australian Grand Prix. "We've hopefully improved the long run since Friday, but we need to be realistic as to what we can achieve from our starting positions. Managing the tyres is a challenge here. They can be fragile, but we will be a few laps in before we can start to see how we are performing in terms of degradation."

Are Mercedes still confident of a good outcome to Sunday's race? Shovlin, hopes Russell and Hamilton will still make the best of it. "It's also a race where the strategy is normally dictated by incidents on track. We'll be on our toes and hopefully we can still take away a decent number of points."