Dino Beganovic takes pole for the first race weekend of the season with his new DAMS Lucas Oil team at Albert Park. He is followed by Martinius Stenshorne and Alex Dunne in second and third place respectively.
The session started with a slight delay but was off only after around 3 minutes with Stenshorne being the first driver at the end of the pit lane and on track.
Most drivers managed to put in at least one good lap in their first outings. Kush Maini at the ART Grand Prix team was showing a great first lap, but only marginally delayed by Emerson Fittipaldi with no note of the supposed incident.
After the first five minutes, Beganovic started his fast streak and topped the timesheets with a 1:29.963, but this would be very far off the final pole time. He enjoyed this for a few minutes until Stenshorne then Nikola Tsolov took back provisional pole.
Tsolov, at Campos Racing, was interviewed before the start of the session.
“I know a few places where the track gets quite tricky. It will be a new challenge I reckon with how the car is difficult to move but you can only do so much.”
The first red flag came out just before 10 minutes of the session had commenced by Mari Boya at Prema who, as well as getting the first track limits penalty, collided with the barrier after travelling through the gravel trap. But the session quickly got underway once again.
Now in Alpine sponsored colours, Dunne had his lap time removed due to track limits at Turn 6 due to exiting wide and only placing 15th by the halfway mark, overall making a huge improvement by the end of today’s running. At this point, most drivers waited in the pit lane to make their final runs.
With 9 minutes to go, another red flag came out as Gabriele Mini had a technical issue with his MP Motorsport car after having multiple issues that were seemingly solved in the pit lane. He voiced his frustration through his radio as the highest place he could achieve would be 19th place, and being noted for causing a red flag. Ultimately he sees himself starting in P21.
In this instance, the clock carried on ticking down but the pit exit remained closed until there was only three minutes left, making this the final opportunity for drivers to make their place in qualifying.
Dunne’s lap was the first to be analysed, and only just missed out on the fastest sector by just more than a tenth of a second, it was Stenshorne that managed to break this first. Dunne achieved provision pole but overtaken by Stenshorne at the end of their laps, then Beganovic produced his 1:28.695. This time was nearly half a second quicker than the pole position time at the start of the 2025 season.
Noel Leon starts in 4th with Tsolov being pushed down to 5th and F3 champion Rafael Camara starting in 6th for his first race weekend in Formula 2.
The Australian Grand Prix weekend continues with the Sprint Race at 14:10 local time on Saturday the 7th and the main Feature Race at 11:25 local time on Sunday the 8th.
Photo by James Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images
