All in all, the opening day of track running at the 2024 Mexico Grand Prix was a frustrating affair for pretty much everyone – except, arguably, Ferrari.
The Scuderia did lose much of FP1 when Ollie Bearman was driving Charles Leclerc’s SF-24, thanks to Alex Albon crashing into the 19-year-old when coming across him in the elongated Esses complex. But when it comes to the times that matter (and there where very few of them to be found on Friday) Ferrari at least showed very well.
Pirelli’s 2025 tyre test took over FP2, with five teams (McLaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Sauber) set to get an extra 30 minutes of running for running rookie drivers in FP1. But this was ruined by George Russell’s big FP2 crash, which put a massive dent in Mercedes’ day given it had started so well with the Briton leading the opening session.
Having had poor weather frustrate much of its other tyre testing at non-race events in 2024, Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola was left wondering if organising a test at Lourdes was the only way to get its luck to change on such things.
At Red Bull, an engine issue aboard Max Verstappen’s car meant his day was pretty much pointless. His title rival Lando Norris’s McLaren squad therefore had the smoothest run of the frontrunners, but then had its Right of Review petition into his Austin penalty rejected well after darkness had fallen on Friday.
Here then, is everything we learned at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on the opening day.
Bearman was one of five FP1 rookie drivers in action, but his outing was cut short by a crash with Albon
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
The story of the day
The most interesting element of FP1 was set to be the rookie drivers aboard the cars above, before one of them – Bearman – was involved in one of the day’s two big crashes.
This was after a first FP1 red flag had occurred when signage from a bridge running across the track’s main straight had been collected by Verstappen (who suffered minor floor damage) and Andrea Kimi Antonelli in Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes.
Albon lost the rear of his Williams as he lifted off coming across the slower-moving Bearman in Leclerc’s Ferrari at Turn 9 during the early stages. He then smashed into the Ferrari’s left-front corner and did even more damage to his own Williams in the barriers at Turn 10 – such was the speed Albon spun at – that he later missed FP2 entirely.
Russell…
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