Perez leads FP1 from Leclerc, Verstappen

Fresh from inking his contract extension at Red Bull and his victory in Monaco last time out, the most successful-ever Mexican driver set the pace with a 1m45.476s, a little over 4s slower than Leclerc’s pole time from the 2021 edition of the race.

Leclerc ran a tenth adrift, while defending champion and points leader Max Verstappen ran to third ahead of Carlos Sainz and the bouncing Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton.

All the drivers ventured out on to the 3.7-mile city street circuit within the first two minutes of the hour, the majority electing to run on the C4 medium-compound Pirelli tyre.

The Red Bulls were the first to complete laps in under 1m50s, with Verstappen taking six minutes to move top with a 1m48.574s effort to sit nine tenths pretty over his teammate.

But after only seven minutes, yellow flags morphed into a virtual safety car to interrupt the running in response to a bizarre car failure for Mick Schumacher.

The German was forced to stop at Turn 12 on what was only his third lap.

The Haas VF-22, rebuilt after its £1million crash in Monaco, was pictured gushing pink liquid from the right edge of the floor.

This is suspected to be radiator fluid, after his engineer reported a “torque protection” trigger following a water pressure spike. He was benched for the rest of the session.

Verstappen was able to improve after 12 minutes, bringing the benchmark down to 1m48.390s with what were at the time, the fastest first and second sector of the day.

But Fernando Alonso was the pacesetter through the flat-out final sector of the lap, having been pulled along by a significant tow.

The VSC was called into play yet again after only a quarter of an hour, this time for five minutes to attend to Nicholas Latifi stopping with a power failure at Turn 5.

Like Schumacher, the Canadian was forced to sit out the remainder of the hour.

Yet again it was Verstappen who ran fastest when the track conditions cleared, the Dutch racer improving to a 1m46.932s to pip Leclerc by…