For the second consecutive weekend, the first day of running on Friday revealed little about the kind of race we can expect to see on Sunday, partly due to tyre testing.
With the second practice session for the Mexican Grand Prix dedicated to learning even more about the rubber drivers could be racing in the 2023 F1 season, the times from the second practice session were again mostly irrelevant to the larger picture of the weekend.
George Russell’s overall best time from second practice of a 1’19.970 put his Mercedes comfortably quickest. But as one of only five drivers permitted to run his weekend’s tyre allocation and use DRS in the 90-minute session, it was a hollow achievement. Despite this, the Mercedes driver came away very positive about his only session of the day.
“Today was one of our better Fridays, if not the best of the year so far,” said Russell. “The car is working well and it felt good driving on this track.
“For qualifying, the difficulty will be to get the tyres in the right window for the single lap run. And on Sunday, it will be difficult to manage temperatures for the engine and for the brakes. A podium finish should hopefully be possible for us this weekend, so that’s what we will be aiming for.”
For the vast majority of the field, the first hour of practice was the only meaningful one of the day. At the end of the first hour, the two Ferraris of Carlos Sainz Jnr and Charles Leclerc were quickest, separated by almost five-hundredths of a second after their push laps on soft tyres. Having topped the most representative session, US GP pole-winner Sainz summed up his Friday as a “positive day” but was not tempted to offer predictions as to whether Ferrari would be the team to beat in Mexico.
Like the previous weekend in the United States, Max Verstappen clearly had the potential to lap quicker than his best time indicated. His 1’20.827 was set on four-lap old softs which had been heavily scrubbed by a spin. He had been a quarter of a second up on Sainz’s ultimate best time of the session and over three tenths up on his own personal best time during his first push lap on the same set, before a tank-slapper through turn 10 resulted in him spinning and ruining his lap entirely.
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“As soon as I came off the track it felt like ice and I was drifting left and right,” Verstappen explained.
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