Australian Grand Prix: George Russell takes first place in Melbourne after Max Verstappen’s accident

Frenchman Hagar said that he was surprised to finish third, expecting Ferrari to overtake him, but in his first appearance with the Red Bull team he did what many of his predecessors could not do and achieved it when Verstappen faced a problem.

The four-time champion spun off and crashed at Turn 1 on the first lap of the session when his rear axle locked, surprising him.

He was shaking his hands after getting out of the car, because he was holding on to the steering wheel when he crashed, but he said nothing was broken.

“I have no idea (what happened),” he said. “I just got into Turn 1 and the rear axle was completely locked while I was pressing the pedal, so that’s a very strange thing that I’ve never experienced in Formula 1 before. So I just need to understand what went wrong.”

He will start 20th, ahead of only Carlos Sainz’s Williams and Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin, neither of whom were able to participate in the session after reliability issues in final practice.

Behind the Racing Bulls, the new Audi team had a strong session with Gabriel Bortoletto and Nico Hulkenberg finishing 10th and 11th, while the Haas cars of Oliver Biermann and Esteban Ocon finished 12th and 13th.

Bortoletto missed the opportunity to start at a higher level because his car broke down on his way back to the pits after the second knockout session.

Alonso took the opportunity to stress how much of a difference it had made to finally be able to complete some laps for a team that was five seconds off the pace on Friday by cutting that to 2.5 seconds in qualifying.

“The whole winter has been filled with this feeling that there is so much more to come, especially in terms of structure,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“We feel pretty good in the corners and we feel like we can be in the top ten easily and then we can’t put the laps together in the winter.

“Here, thanks to the more natural second and third practices, we were able to get two seconds easily just because we ran.

“It’s a matter of continuing to do laps and staying together. There’s no secret that the main problem is the PU (power unit). We lack power and reliability. We couldn’t manage many laps in the winter and now we’re short on battery reserves, we can’t do many laps or we’re short on parts. We need to fix the power units and Aston Martin is trying to help as much as we can with Honda.”