2018 F1 Round 1 Australian GP FP3 — Vettel leads rain-affected practice, times offer limited comparison

Saturday’s third practice session for the Australian Grand Prix took place at Albert Park on 24 March 2018. Rain affected the circuit, requiring drivers to assess grip and tyre choice before deciding whether to attempt qualifying-style flying laps. The amount of useful running was markedly lower than in Friday’s two sessions.

Sebastian Vettel led with a 1:26.067, with team-mate Kimi Räikkönen second, 2.432 seconds behind. The gap largely reflected changes in track conditions at different times. It could not be read directly as an equivalent difference in outright pace between Ferrari’s drivers.

Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson was third with a 1:28.890, followed by Max Verstappen fourth and Carlos Sainz fifth. Some midfield and leading teams ran their single-lap programmes at different times. Changing rainfall continually altered grip, so the order largely recorded performances within brief windows of opportunity.

Lewis Hamilton completed only seven laps and finished eighth, while Valtteri Bottas was seventh with 14 laps. Mercedes did not appear to be pursuing a large volume of timed running in this session. The team needed to check wet-weather settings and the condition of its cars while preserving tyres and machinery for the qualifying session that followed.

Some drivers were unable to set a valid lap time. Esteban Ocon and Sergio Pérez were credited with only one lap each, with no time listed for either in the official table. Their positions and gaps therefore offered no measure of car performance, but their official entries remain in the table to retain the complete field.

Haas drivers Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen were fifteenth and seventeenth, with insufficient laps for a thorough dry-weather comparison. Williams, Toro Rosso and McLaren used the limited running to gather information on track conditions, leaving their engineers to interpret the scattered data carefully.

Saturday’s uncertain weather also complicated qualifying strategy. Teams had to balance the timing of switches between wet-weather and dry tyres with traffic on track. FP3 could not provide a complete single-lap ranking, but it helped drivers learn the slippery sections and gain experience for potentially changing race conditions.

Vettel topped FP3 with a 1:26.067, followed by Räikkönen and Ericsson. With the weather producing substantial differences in lap totals and track conditions, the table below reproduces the official results for all 20 drivers, including the two who set no timed lap, without drawing further conclusions from the distorted gaps.