If Friday practice is anything to go by, then the Singapore Grand Prix promises to develop into a closely fought weekend between Ferrari and McLaren. Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris were separated by little in each of the two sessions, chalking up one session each at the others’ expense by less than a tenth.
As ever in Singapore, there was only one truly representative session; the night-time FP2 is the closest of the three practice hours in terms of track conditions and temperature, giving its equivalent timing to the qualifying and race phases of the weekend. Naturally, the teams wanted to use that opportunity to get some running in – and hope that none of their drivers suffered an ignominious tangle with the barriers.
Elsewhere, the likes of Red Bull and Mercedes dealt with two hours of set-up struggles, while the likes of RB surprised with consistent one-lap pace among the top half of the field. As ever, it’s shaping up to be an intriguing weekend at Marina Bay.
The story of the day
Leclerc delivered the first punch of the weekend with the fastest time in FP1, albeit with a scant 0.076-second advantage over Norris, after managing to improve over three timed laps on a single set of soft tyres. A dusty track surface prompted the majority of the field to conduct their early-session exploration runs on the hards and mediums, although the track evolution was characteristically rapid for a street circuit as the road surface began to take on rubber.
Norris had occupied the top of the leaderboard in the opening soft-tyre runs, but Leclerc was able to overturn that to hint that McLaren and Ferrari may yet do battle again at the front – as they had a week ago in Baku.
FP2 further reinforced that, as Norris outpaced Leclerc by an even more slender 0.058 seconds as the two proved to be a cut above the rest of the order. Their gap to the third-fastest Carlos Sainz stood at over half a second, as the Spaniard put this down to a series of issues with his brakes that sapped at his confidence in the lower-speed corners.
Norris edged Leclerc to top second practice by a tiny margin, pointing to a very tight qualifying battle to come
Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images
And, while Norris looked rapid on track, he too suffered a few wayward moments; he noted that he “hit the wall pretty hard” at Turn 3, at the start of his longer runs. Leclerc felt that he’d done a similar move at Turn 14, as the closeness of the barriers…
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