Payton Westcott delivered a stellar performance in her first practice session at the F1 Academy Chinese GP. She had a top 3 finish in the session, behind Alisha Palmowski and Alba Larsen.
The Mercedes-backed driver finished third fastest in the session, setting a time of 2:05.041, which was the fastest time out of the rookies on the timesheets.
Although this is not Westcott’s first weekend in F1 Academy — having appeared as a Wild Card in the 2025 season finale in Las Vegas — she believes it is important not to read too much into her Practice session result.
“For me, based on this Practice session, I want to make sure that I don’t set my expectations too high, and keep them back where I originally imagined at the beginning of the weekend,” she said.
“I don’t want to let this get ahead of me and then worry about where I am. I’m really keeping my expectations level and my head straight.”
“I definitely showed some pace. I think Alba [Larsen] and I were on similar run plans and Alisha did something completely different, so that gave her a good advantage. Looking good going into Qualifying so obviously this gave us some confidence.”
Quick turnaround for Westcott from Practice to Qualifying
With only a few hours between Free Practice and Qualifying, the 16-year old added that any adjustments made between the sessions will have to consider the changing conditions on track throughout the day.
The Shanghai International Circuit is already a technical challenge for the drivers, combing the dusty and windy conditions seen in the early minutes of Practice. But with an hour of running for F1’s FP1 session, the track is expected to significantly change between the two sessions.
“It’ll definitely be interesting to observe because in Vegas, it was really difficult to tell with the fact it was a street circuit, and also how cold it was, and the rain,” Westcott explained. “I think that those factors kind of threw it off a bit in Vegas because when they did open up the Strip, it allowed other cars on track and they dropped oil or whatever. It’ll be interesting for me to observe going into this for the first time with these circumstances.”
Westcott believes that it will be interesting to compare the conditions in from Free Practice to Qualifying at the F1 Academy Chinese GP, with high hopes for Qualifying result.
“We’ll be looking at the data, making some changes with the car, different improvements. Obviously with the F1 cars now going out, it’ll be a completely different track going into Qualifying so adapting to that will definitely give me an advantage. Hopefully we do well!”
