The Friday in F1 Abu Dhabi GP went smooth as McLaren took the first blood in its fight against Ferrari, while the other big runners struggled a touch.
It was a smoother Friday in F1 Abu Dhabi GP at Yas Marina circuit as McLaren took top spot especially in FP2 with Lando Norris leading Oscar Piastri in 1-2 finish. They felt good in the car straight up and are in good space of mind going into Saturday, where qualifying will be key.
They had challenge from Ferrari, who looked good but aren’t certain about the soft tyre performance. Carlos Sainz felt good despite missing FP1, while Charles Leclerc suffered from food poising which hurt his day. He has a penalty too now, which he thinks adds to the difficulties in title fight.
Both Red Bull and Mercedes had mixed run, especially the former who ended up outside the Top 10. In fact, Max Verstappen was only 17th in FP1 as he struggled with balance. Both he and Sergio Perez thought the race pace was slightly better than the one lap pace.
At Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton was all about emotions in his final weekend with the team. He had a decent run but lamented the qualifying pace as he has been all year long, while George Russell struggled a bit more while trying different things for the weekend.
Norris: “It was a good day, yeah. The car’s been feeling good the whole day, so [it] continued our pace out of Qatar and, yeah, it feels strong. I think we have some things to improve on in both low and high fuel, more so the high fuel. Totally looks probably better than it is, I don’t think the others turned up their engines yet, so it might look glorious for now but I think we’re still going to have a tough fight tomorrow. I mean it’s nothing huge, it’s small things. It’s trying to find the balance of going quicker but saving the tyres, especially in the longer run stuff. [It’s] how much where can you push more and where do you need to save, how can you save the tyres more with driving, the toys, things I can change on my steering wheel and the underlying balance on the car. Just trying to find the right compromise is the main thing.”
Leclerc: “Yeah, it makes our weekend more difficult. It all started unfortunately last night when I got food poisoned and couldn’t sleep all the night which… I’m so tired, I just want to sleep now. It wasn’t so easy, even this morning I didn’t feel like I wanted to drive, but obviously the huge motivation of the day was doing the FP1 with my younger brother. This is a dream that [has] come true today for both of us, for all of our family that travelled all the way from Monaco to see that and it was a very emotional moment. I definitely had to put the helmet on very early because I also was emotional. And then that’s where everything started to go wrong unfortunately because as soon as we fired up the car, we saw that there was a problem with the energy store. [There were] lots of things going through my head – first, am I going to drive this FP1 with my brother which is a unique opportunity, and obviously also the championship.
“That [penalty] makes our weekend a lot more difficult, but that doesn’t demotivate me at all. I feel a little bit better tonight already, I’ll have a good night’s sleep and I’ll come back tomorrow with a battery fully recharged. Hopefully we’ll have a great day tomorrow and then have an amazing recovery on Sunday. [That is] another thing [Sainz leaving] that adds to this up-and-down weekend, emotionally speaking. We really want to finish on a high. This morning we ended up watching FP1 together and we were a bit sad both of us for what had happened, because obviously we rely on each other in trying to win this constructors’ and we really want to end these four years together in the best possible way. But sometimes things happen outside of our control and that’s what happened today. But we’ve had an amazing relationship, amazing four years, and we’ll give it all until the very last lap in order to end these four years together in the best possible way.
“The McLaren seems to be quicker unfortunately so for now they’ve got the upper hand, but we know that it can swing one way or the other very quickly. We’ve got to stay on top of everything, and it won’t be finished until the very end. As we’ve seen unfortunately today on our side, we’ve had a problem but, yeah, I’m not wishing a problem to anybody else, we’ll just focus on ourselves and try to do an amazing recovery on Sunday.”
Verstappen: “Just not a very good balance to be honest. Just no connected balance from entry to mid-corner, and that makes it then of course difficult to basically push. And that’s something that we’ve got to work on overnight. I‘m sure that we can do better. I’m not saying that we’ll be at McLaren level, because they seem very quick so far this weekend, but at least if we can fight in that top six, that will be a good recovery, because so far it’s been quite tricky.”
Russell: “Today was a bit of a struggle, but it’s only Friday. We were also trying a lot of different things today in preparation for next year as obviously this is our last opportunity to do so. We therefore wanted to go a little more radical with the set-up options, see if there’s anything more we can learn, and test things to develop our learnings and understanding for 2025. As we saw, Lewis did some great laps today.
“Still, as a team, we don’t seem to be on the pace of the very front runners on a single lap. McLaren in particular look to be in a league of their own at the moment and their pace in both sessions showed that again today. Tomorrow, I expect the Ferraris to be back in the mix but I’m hoping we can make some improvements overnight and have a more competitive showing than today.”
The Top 10 featured other drivers too, like Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg who was as high as third in FP1. Despite the good pace as showed by him and Kevin Magnussen, they feel that it will be tight to make it into the Top 10 in qualifying with the competition around.
Even Kick Sauber’s Valtteri Bottas found pace to be in the Top 10, but he knows it is close in qualifying. His teammate Zhou Guanyu struggled a bit to get the car in decent window. Visa Cash App RB’s Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda were okay with the pace, but are wary of the fight at hand.
Alpine ran a lot of miles especially on Pierre Gasly’s side to understand the car a bit more, as Jack Doohan had his first FP2 chance to learn more how the weekend is constructed. It wasn’t a good run for Aston Martin and Williams, with Fernando Alonso showcasing his displeasure.
Even Lance Stroll didn’t feel good. Both Alexander Albon and Franco Colapinto had troubles, especially the Argentine whose session ended early due to floor damage. There were several FP1 runners – like Isack Hadjar, Arthur Leclerc, Ayumu Iwasa, Felipe Drugovich, Ryo Hirawaka and Luke Browning – who shared their thoughts as well.
Hulkenberg: “It was a very solid Friday. From P1 this morning, the car felt somehow in a happy place in the sweet spot, which is obviously a good place to start from, a good foundation. Now we need to try and preserve that – try to improve little things here and there and just optimise everything. Be good on the operations side and execute cleanly. I think in P2 a lot of guys were out of position for whatever reason. Many main drivers didn’t run this morning so maybe it had something to do with that. I think it’s still going to be a challenge to get into the top 10 and into Q3, but I think it’s possible if we do a really good job.”
Bottas: “Today has been a positive start for us. The improved pace we’ve had in recent events seems to have carried on to Abu Dhabi, and I think we have a good base car now upon which to build, as the balance is in a decent window. We know it’s going to be extremely close in qualifying, so we need to make sure we find a bit more performance for tomorrow. If we do that, we should be again in a strong position to fight for a good qualifying result, while also not compromising on the setup for the for the race.”
Lawson: “The car is looking decent, we still have another practice session to go and then qualifying obviously, but we’re in a good place; we’re chipping away a bit, but then so is everybody else. Compared to last week we’re in a stronger position, we feel more confident coming here with the car. At the same time, we’re not exactly where we want to be yet, especially with Haas and Niko being 3rd in that session. We obviously need to bridge that gap, but it’s a strong start. I’m hoping for Q3 tomorrow, but honestly the midfield is so close right now, one tenth up and we’re P8 and one tenth back and we’re P16, it’s very very close, it’s probably going to be a bit of a fight this weekend.”
Doohan: “Firstly, a great experience in the car in Abu Dhabi in what was a very busy day. There’s a lot to understand and learn and it was good to get a lot of laps in across both sessions. Free Practice 2 was obviously new territory for me! I just tried to build up the laps and my first few runs in the second session were not the cleanest on my side but that is all part of Practice. There are some steps to make ahead of Free Practice 3 for the team and I look forward to debriefing with the engineers to find those improvements. I am aiming to get more comfortable with each lap and keep pushing closer to where I want to be. Thanks to the entire team for their hard work.”
Alonso: “It was a difficult day as we tried to optimise things. The car felt a little better in FP2, but we still have some work to do overnight to find the best setup going into Qualifying. It’s looking like it’s going to be a difficult to fight for the points, but we will do our best tomorrow.”
Albon: “We need to investigate what happened in FP2 further, but everything was okay in my shortened long run. It’s a shame to miss part of probably the most important weekend session, but I’m not unhappy as the car feels more competitive than in Qatar. We’ve got some work to do tonight and considering the 5-place grid penalty, the long run is crucial to understand. So, it’s not ideal but we’re taking it in our stride and will do our best to understand the car further.”
Hadjar: “Today was an intense session but I really enjoyed myself. We had a great run plan and I managed to get in more laps than I have done in previous sessions. It didn’t start that well and we had a bit of a spin at the beginning as I was a bit shy on the brakes. However, I improved quite rapidly and was pleased with my long run performance and was more competitive on the short runs too. This was my fourth time in an F1 car today, so I still feel quite new to it and feel like I could have explored the limits of the car even more. I learned a lot and, after driving an F1 car, it feels a lot slower going back to F2 even though it is incredibly physical! All in all I am really happy with today: it was much better performance and an improvement on my previous practice sessions.”
A Leclerc: “A lot of emotions today. It was just incredible to take part in my first F1 session for Scuderia Ferrari HP, alongside my brother. It was a dream come true. The target for today was less focused on me as a driver and more on delivering as much information and data to the team as they wrap up their season. We were on different run plans, I first ran some aero tests and then some further testing to compare our two runs. It felt great, I’ve been working hard to prepare and have put in a lot of hours in the sim, so to have my first outing in F1 is a great way to end this year. A big thank you to the whole team for this opportunity, it was a day I will never forget.”
Hirakawa: “Firstly, I want to say thank you to the team for the opportunity to drive in FP1. It was a great experience, and I really enjoyed being on track in the MCL38. I had lots of work to do supporting the team doing aero tests with the rakes, with some push laps at the end, which all went to plan. I appreciate the efforts of everyone who prepared me for this, from the time in the sim to the MCL36 tests. Best of luck to the entire team this weekend in the battle for the Constructors’ title.”
Drugovich: “We managed to test everything we wanted to and try a few things with the objective of potentially applying them to next year’s car. Towards the end of the session I did some laps on the Soft tyre so I could push and have a bit of fun. I was pleased with my fastest lap and I enjoyed driving the AMR24. It’s always nice to classify as the fastest rookie as well.”
Iwasa: “This was another amazing day for me. I enjoyed it very much and had a good feeling from the car, more than from my previous time driving a Formula 1 car. I hope the team was able to get some good data from the testing we were doing during the session. It was a little bit difficult to build up the pace with all the things we had to test but I was able to do a new tyre run towards the end. Overall, I’m happy with how everything went and it was a useful experience for my future.”
Browning: “It was thoroughly enjoyable to get my first taste of a Williams F1 car. Thank you to everyone at Williams for the opportunity and an amazing learning experience. It’s never easy hopping into an F1 car in an official session for the first time, but we built up slowly and brought the car home. I can’t wait to get back behind the wheel on Tuesday for the Young Driver Test.”
Here’s how FP1 of F1 Abu Dhabi GP panned out
Here’s how FP2 of F1 Abu Dhabi GP panned out
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