George Russell’s fading world championship hopes were dealt an encouraging boost in Azerbaijan after he completed a practice double.
Russell has fallen 81 points behind Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli with nine scheduled rounds remaining.
However, Russell will head into qualifying at the street venue on Friday on the front foot after he set the pace in Baku, while Antonelli’s running was derailed by mechanical gremlins.
Antonelli was forced to sit out more than half of the one-hour opening session after he broke down in his Mercedes with a loss of hydraulic pressure.
The failure also sidelined Antonelli for 30 minutes of the day’s concluding running with his Mercedes mechanics scrambling to repair his car.
Antonelli completed just 25 laps across the two sessions – significantly, 23 fewer than Russell – and he finished the afternoon 0.552 seconds behind.
Russell conceded his chances of stopping Antonelli from winning the world title were “exceptionally unlikely” after seeing his team-mate romp to his eighth win of the season at the previous round in Madrid.
The Briton endured a disappointing weekend in the Spanish capital, finishing fifth, half-a-minute behind his younger team-mate.
Russell began this season as the title favourite, but he has carved out only two wins – at the opener in Australia and then again in Austria in June – and his deficit to Antonelli in the standings is the equivalent of more than three wins.
So, the British driver will hope to use his speed as a springboard heading into the business end of the 15th round and start chipping away at Antonelli’s lead which leaves him, with the bookmakers at least, as a rank 40/1 championship outsider. Antonelli is 1/16.
At one stage, Lewis Hamilton harboured expectations of taking a record eighth crown but an underwhelming run of results since he claimed his first Ferrari win in Barcelona in June means he is 101 points back.
On Thursday, he finished fifth, 1.3 sec adrift of Russell, and he was also summoned to the stewards after appearing to block Liam Lawson – a move the New Zealander described as “so f****** dangerous”.
Hamilton finished a place ahead of Lando Norris. The defending world champion should have won in Madrid before an ill-timed Virtual Safety Car cruelly denied him his third win in four appearances.
Norris, 106 points behind Antonelli, arrived in Baku fearing the long straights and slow corners would not play to his McLaren’s strengths. And he was 1.5 sec off the pace.
The second session was red-flagged after British rookie Arvid Lindblad crashed out. The 19-year-old lost control of his Racing Bulls through the uphill Castle section underneath the historic 12th century Baku Fortress wall.
The area of asphalt from one side of the track to the other measures at just 7.6 metres – the narrowest section of any track on the calendar – and Lindblad’s error of brushing the opening turn of the chicane proved costly.
“I literally clipped it by a millimetre,” said Lindblad over the radio as his session came to a staggering halt.
Elsewhere, Max Verstappen took third for Red Bull, nearly nine tenths behind Russell, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc fourth.
