The Latest Breaking News from McLaren

Verstappen will start ahead of Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez after the one-hour qualifying session, which was split into three segments with five cars each being knocked out in Q1 and Q2 before the top-10 shootout of Q3. 

Verstappen took pole position with a last-gasp 1m15.915s effort, bettering a still-recovering Carlos Sainz by 0.170 seconds.

Piastri has arrived at his home race in Melbourne in a much stronger situation than was the case on his debut last year, when the Australian GP was only his third F1 start and the Woking team was struggling with an uncompetitive car.

A small but interesting feature was added to the rear wing pylon on the Ferrari SF-24 in Australia, as the team employed a winglet on either side of the assembly. It's somewhat surprising that we haven't seen teams do this before, given it is clearly allowable within that box region.

A small but interesting feature was added to the rear wing pylon on the Ferrari SF-24 in Australia, as the team employed a winglet on either side of the assembly. It's somewhat surprising that we haven't seen teams do this before, given it's clearly allowable within that box region.

A brief excursion at Turn 1 mattered little to Charles Leclerc. He was already on top of the Formula 1 pile in FP2, prior to his brief off towards the end of the session, having beaten Max Verstappen by almost four-tenths of a second.

The American joined the Woking outfit in 2016, initially as the executive director of the McLaren Technology Group before moving into his current position as the CEO in the middle of 2018.

Leclerc was top in all three sectors on Friday as only a later Max Verstappen effort denied Ferrari a 1-2. 

Lando Norris was fastest in first practice, setting a 1m18.564s lap, while Leclerc paced FP2 with a quickest time of 1m17.277s.