The Scuderia Ferrari HP cars will line up on the second and fourth rows of the grid for the start of the Australian Grand Prix, the first round of the 2026 season.

By the end of a closely contested session, which featured a few red flag interruptions, Charles Leclerc qualified fourth, a whisker off the third placed time, while Lewis Hamilton was seventh fastest.

Both drivers got their SF-26s through to Q3 without too much difficulty, running Medium tyres for the first part, so as to have two sets of Softs for each of the next two phases. In the final one, both drivers went out on Softs, Leclerc posting a 1'20"244 and Hamilton a 1'20"423. They then did a second and final run on new Softs, with Charles setting a time of 1'19"327 to secure fourth spot, just 24 thousandths off Isack Hadjar's third placed time. Lewis was classified seventh with a 1'19"478, three thousandths off the sixth fastest time set by Lando Norris.

Charles Leclerc: There were some challenges today, as expected for the first qualifying in these new cars. We had an issue with energy deployment in Q2, which was fixed as soon as we came back to the garage. We will take what we learned today forward to the next qualifying.

It's difficult to make any predictions for now. It's the first race weekend of a new regulatory cycle, and a championship that will be won by development. That race is just starting. We are very focused on that and will extract everything we have from our current package. It will be interesting to see how all the teams will manage the race tomorrow.

Lewis Hamilton: Today's result is not where we wanted or expected to be, mainly because we lost execution at an important stage of qualifying. However, the car felt solid and there is clearly more potential than the final position suggests. Now it's about understanding the issues, staying composed, and making the most of tomorrow.

Fred Vasseur: It was a tough and rather chaotic qualifying session, but that was the same for everyone. You can do as much testing as you like, but it is never the same as tackling a real qualifying session with all the other cars around you. It was a new challenge and we did not manage to put everything together, as we had a few issues during the session. What is clear is that today the gap to Mercedes is significant and we will have to make progress to get closer to them. So far this weekend our pace has been decent, but there is still a lot for all the teams to discover and we have probably not yet seen everyone's true potential. The most important thing is to learn from what we did not do well today and focus on tomorrow's race.

Check out our Saturday gallery from Melbourne here.