Verstappen tops opening practice as Leclerc, Colapinto crash

Reigning world champion Max Verstappen headed an incident-packed first practice session for Formula 1’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which was red flagged for crashes by Charles Leclerc and Franco Colapinto.

Baku’s high-speed layout offers low grip at the best of times as a one-off street circuit, but a light rain shower in the morning washed away what little grip F2 cars had attempted to lay down in their practice sessions. Upon exiting the pits McLaren’s Oscar Piastri relayed conditions were “very, very low grip’ on the 6km city loop.

It was therefore no surprise that lap times were initially up to six seconds slower than last year’s FP1 session, with Red Bull’s Verstappen leading the way after 10 minutes courtesy of his 1m47.214s on medium tyres, demoting early efforts by Ferrari’s Leclerc and Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton.

After 12 minutes the red flag came out a first time for a small piece of metal debris at Turn 12, which caused a five-minute break in the proceedings.

Once action got back underway, Verstappen wasted no time lowering his own benchmark to a 1m46.858s, but was immediately trumped by Leclerc’s 1m46.608s, all set on medium tyres.

But Leclerc’s day took a dramatic turn for the worse when the Monegasque driver clattered into the wall at Turn 15 before the halfway mark, damaging his front right corner and bringing out the second red flag of the session.

On the team radio, Leclerc explained scooping up dirt caused his relatively low-speed shunt, with replays confirming the Ferrari driver dipped his front-right wheel off the racing line onto a dirtier part of the track, which led to a lock-up.

The session restarted with 26 minutes remaining, with most frontrunners moving onto the soft tyres.

A host of drivers traded turns atop the leaderboard on Pirelli’s softest compound, including Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and McLaren duo Piastri and Lando Norris.

Hamilton was the latest driver to head the timesheets with a 1m45.859s before the session was red flagged a third time due to a crash by Williams rookie Colapinto.

On his first-ever session in Baku the 21-year-old Argentine lost the rear into the tight Turn 4 right-hander, with the back-end of his FW46 smashing into the outside wall, followed in by the front-left.

The session resumed once more with 11 minutes on the clock to allow a window for soft-tyre runs.

Verstappen threatened to take over…