Melbourne is not a bad place to start for the Silver Arrows, with the 35-year-old having secured seven of the last eight pole positions at Albert Park in a run dating back to 2012.
Success on Saturday, though, has rarely translated to the top step on Sunday. Hamilton has achieved race victory on just one of those occasions, back in 2015.
Team-mate Valtteri Bottas was the latest to deny Hamilton a win from pole in Australia, as he led home a Mercedes one-two last year.
There may never be a better time for ‘Bottas 3.0’ to arrive, with the beginning of the F1 schedule looking so uncertain.
If there is a weakness for Mercedes, it might be unreliability. Hamilton came to a halt during testing and all Mercedes-powered cars ran the final two days with engines turned down.
Team principal Toto Wolff, however, maintained that the team is fully prepared for round one of the season.
“We managed to get through most of our programme as planned at the winter tests; however, we faced some reliability issues that we needed to resolve,” he said.
“We’re glad that we encountered these issues in testing rather than at a race weekend as we could work on fixing them without any penalties.”