All in all, the opening day of track running at the 2024 Mexico Grand Prix was a frustrating affair for pretty much everyone – except, arguably, Ferrari.
The Scuderia did lose much of FP1 when Ollie Bearman was driving Charles Leclerc’s SF-24, thanks to Alex Albon crashing into the 19-year-old when coming across him in the elongated Esses complex. But when it comes to the times that matter (and there where very few of them to be found on Friday) Ferrari at least showed very well.
Pirelli’s 2025 tyre test took over FP2, with five teams (McLaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Sauber) set to get an extra 30 minutes of running for running rookie drivers in FP1. But this was ruined by George Russell’s big FP2 crash, which put a massive dent in Mercedes’ day given it had started so well with the Briton leading the opening session.
Having had poor weather frustrate much of its other tyre testing at non-race events in 2024, Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola was left wondering if organising a test at Lourdes was the only way to get its luck to change on such things.
At Red Bull, an engine issue aboard Max Verstappen’s car meant his day was pretty much pointless. His title rival Lando Norris’s McLaren squad therefore had the smoothest run of the frontrunners, but then had its Right of Review petition into his Austin penalty rejected well after darkness had fallen on Friday.
Here then, is everything we learned at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on the opening day.
The story of the day
The most interesting element of FP1 was set to be the rookie drivers aboard the cars above, before one of them – Bearman – was involved in one of the day’s two big crashes.
This was after a first FP1 red flag had occurred when signage from a bridge running across the track’s main straight had been collected by Verstappen (who suffered minor floor damage) and Andrea Kimi Antonelli in Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes.
Albon lost the rear of his Williams as he lifted off coming across the slower-moving Bearman in Leclerc’s Ferrari at Turn 9 during the early stages. He then smashed into the Ferrari’s left-front corner and did even more damage to his own Williams in the barriers at Turn 10 – such was the speed Albon spun at – that he later missed FP2 entirely.
Russell topped FP1 with a 1m17.998s ahead of Sainz in the remaining Ferrari by 0.317s. Red Bull’s session was marred by Verstappen reporting "something [was] wrong" with his engine and stopping his running five minutes early.
On the 2024 mediums, which in our assessment only concerns Ferrari and Mercedes, the scarlet squad led a not very close comparison of 1m21.357s vs 1m22.371s
In FP2, that engine issue – said to be a "leak somewhere", by Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko – reoccurred aboard the world champion’s RB20. That was even after Red Bull thought it had solved the issue during the break between practice sessions and around the long red-flag caused by Russell’s crash.
Verstappen therefore only completed four laps in FP2. Russell only did that total too, having lost the rear of his W15 at Turn 8 when he appeared to drag his right-rear too far over the inside kerbs and so his car bottomed out and he was pitched into a spin that ended smashed sideways into the Turn 9 barriers.
These took nearly 25 minutes to rearrange and so the added 30 minutes of FP2 for the Pirelli test was lost. Either side of the stoppage, Sainz improved the first-place benchmark from 1m17.809s to 1m17.699s and was trailed by Oscar Piastri’s McLaren by 0.178s.
The lost time meant while the rookie-running teams did get out on the weekend’s medium tyres (having used a combination of 2024 C4s and C5s, 2025 versions of those compounds, plus a prototype C6 only given to Williams and RB for the Pirelli test) they could only do so for a handful of laps at the end.
Norris did use his mediums to rise to fifth in the final FP2 order, while the five rookie-runners were the only drivers able to conduct practice starts in the session.
The decision over McLaren’s Right of Review then took over as the main story on Friday night, as, nearly six hours after the hearing with Austin stewards commenced, the decision was announced that it had been rejected.
This centred on how the stewards felt McLaren’s argument that an error had been made in Norris being penalised as the attacking car when he was so far ahead of Verstappen that he became the defender when the Dutchman shot his Red Bull to the Turn 12 apex – critical under the current racing guidelines – was “unsustainable”.
What the (limited) data tells us
FP2 long-run data is usually fraught with peril when it comes to interpreting how the teams have stacked up in opening practices, but given the Pirelli test dominated the second session on Friday it means they must be treated with even more caution than usual.
Although the run plans Pirelli mandated means we can know how much fuel was aboard each car during a long run on some 2024 tyres (we’re only looking at the top four teams here), the drivers needing to adjust their approaches and deal with jumping between new and old tyre constructions means they cannot be considered fully representative.
The run plans for the Pirelli test were two performance fliers over five laps with 20kg of fuel aboard for each car, plus two 10-lap stints with 100kg – the second of which were slightly shortened as a result of the red flag (from 12 to eight).
On the 2024 mediums, which in our assessment only concerns Ferrari and Mercedes, the scarlet squad led a not very close comparison of 1m21.357s vs 1m22.371s. Leclerc’s second Pirelli long-run (after he’d done a stint on the 2025 mediums) had him ahead of Hamilton by an average of 1.014s.
In other positive news for Ferrari, and this is important given Pirelli said “teams will have to prepare their cars for qualifying and the race in the space of two hours: FP1 on Friday and FP3 on Saturday” in its press release explanation of how the tyre test would work, Sainz edged the long runs all of top teams completed at FP1’s end.
His average on the hards came in at 1m22.150s, which is another healthy 1.061s ahead of Russell’s best for Mercedes (Antonelli was still doing staccato runs at this stage so not assessed). This points to a fairly hefty fuel discrepancy between Ferrari and Mercedes at that point in the opening session.
Given the aberration of the Pirelli test in FP2 this weekend, extra premium is now placed on nailing set-ups in Saturday’s FP3 offering, as well as gathering extra long-run information
McLaren was third-best on the hards with a 1m23.332s, while Verstappen’s woes meant Perez’s FP1-concluding long-run represented Red Bull’s entry at 1m23.392s.
Looking at the FP2 efforts on the 2024 C5s (the softs used for the rest of this weekend), McLaren edged Red Bull with a 1m21.800s from Norris versus Perez’s 1m22.353s.
Given the aberration of the Pirelli test in FP2 this weekend, extra premium is now placed on nailing set-ups in Saturday’s FP3 offering, as well as gathering extra long-run information. Any team that has a crash in the ultra-low-downforce, thin-air challenge here – or has any more reliability maladies – will be in serious trouble.
