Perez leads Leclerc in opening practice

Perez ended up just 0.004s clear of Leclerc, with Max Verstappen third ahead of Carlos Sainz and Mercedes pair Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.

With just the one hour of practice running to get in before Friday’s qualifying session for the final sprint weekend of 2023, the pack headed out en masse at the start – their running split across the hard and medium compounds.

Kevin Magnussen, running at the head of the snake out of the pits, duly set the first place benchmark at 1m16.443s on the hards before a flurry of faster times shuffled the Haas driver back.

After Hamilton had bested Valtteri Bottas and Esteban Ocon on their respective first runs, Perez brought the benchmark under the 1m15.0s bracket for the first time just before the end of the opening five minutes.

He then beat his first time of 1m14.616s with a 1m14.477s on his next lap on the hards, before Verstappen, who abandoned his first flier having slipped off at Turn 4, where he so controversially defended against Hamilton in last year’s GP at Interlagos, forged ahead.

Verstappen’s 1m14.104s stood as the benchmark overall and for the hard runners for a few minutes before Bottas set the quickest time on the mediums just before the end of the first 10 minutes with a 1m13.807s.

As Verstappen continued to pound around on the hards he bested Bottas again with a 1m13.646s and then a 1m13.575s as the session’s opening quarter ended and the pack headed back to the pits to make adjustments.

A lull in action followed before Perez became the first driver to head out on the softs with 25 minutes completed.

He shot ahead with a 1m11.853s despite running hard over the kerbs between Turns 4 and 5 and nearly bottoming out – the Mexican driver also enjoying a near-empty track as most of his rivals continued to sit in the pits.

Verstappen was the next runner to complete a softs flier at the session’s halfway point, with the world champion setting the a purple first sector before fading back compared to Perez and ending up 0.008s adrift on a 1m11.861s, complaining that his car “doesn’t turn” as he was “just waiting for the fronts”.

Here the teams diverged on their run plans, with Ferrari and Mercedes sending Hamilton and Leclerc back out to log laps on the mediums, while Sainz remained in the pits, as did Russell initially before he also…