Friday of rookies in Mexico City for the very first free practice session of the weekend: from Pato O’Ward taking over the McLaren of Lando Norris on home soil, to Felipe Drugovich stepping in for Fernando Alonso at Aston and Robert Shwartzman taking Zhou Guanyu’s place beside Valtteri Bottas.
For some only a chance to try out an F1 single-seater, for others rather a sneak peak of what next season will be.
Among them, in fact, there were also Oliver Bearman who has his F1 seat already secured for next year, at Haas and Kimi Antonelli who will be taking over Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes seat.
The 18-year-old had already made his debut in the W15 last month in Monza, but it was a very short lived session, as he had an incident in the first minutes of FP1.
Things definitely went better this time around and he managed to complete a total of 19 laps around the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, that was worth P12 at the end of the session.
“Definitely much better than Monza,” he told media on Friday.
“I drove much calmer today, I didn’t want to take any risks. I just wanted to do a clean session, just to get some laps, understand the car a bit more, understand the tyres. I think overall it was pretty decent.”
“Of course, I could feel I was on the limit, but just because it was my choice. I just wanted to get a clean session overall.”
Not everything ran smoothly, as he had to come back into the garage for a not so quick stop in the first laps, after picking up some debris that was on track.
“To be honest, I didn’t really see it. It was a shame because I got quite a bit of floor damage from it. It was quite a bit of damage,” he explained.
“So yeah, of course it wasn’t ideal, but still managed to get a few laps in the back.”
He started FP1 on the hardest compound and switched on the softest one later on towards the end of the session.
“Well, you know, I was trying to build confidence lap by lap. Also, it was my first time on this track, so I was trying to learn as much as possible,” he said.
“Of course, on the Softs, the stepping grip was quite big. Also, because on Hards, I was doing consecutive laps. I wasn’t really doing one push and then cool and push again.”
“I was doing consecutives, so I couldn’t really try the single lap work. So I went on Softs and I felt a lot more grip and didn’t really use it because I was really surprised by the amount of grip.”
Despite going out on track with a more conservative approach this time around, he was able to built up a good rhythm rather quickly.
“I was able to pick up the pace quite quickly. Of course, I was not on the absolute limit, but it was good like this,” he commented.
“The day went quite well. I did what I needed to do after Monza. Of course, I didn’t push to the limit. I had a margin, but that’s how it is. The important thing was to do laps and to gain experience.”
