Lewis Hamilton and George Russell failed to make an impression in Friday practice ahead of Mercedes’ second-place showdown with Ferrari at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Lewis Hamilton is worried he might not even qualify in the top 10 for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Hamilton drove his Mercedes W14 once more in FP2, having skipped Friday’s first practice to allow rookie Frederik Vesti to get some experience behind the wheel. However, he only finished eighth fastest in a session marred by incidents and twice flagged for red flags.
Neither George Russell nor Charles Leclerc fared much better, finishing sixth fastest among the British. Carlos Sainz, the driver of the other Ferrari, didn’t record a time before crashing early in the session.
Mercedes and Ferrari are separated by just four points going into the year’s final race. Furthermore, Hamilton worries that if he and Russell are to maintain their second-place ranking in the standings, they will have an uphill battle during the race.
He remarked, “It wasn’t the best of days.” This year’s qualifying sessions have been challenging, and it has always been difficult to advance from Q1 to Q2, and it can be difficult to advance to Q3. Tomorrow’s task is to attempt to enter Q3. However, it will be quite close.
Most teams learned very little about where they stand in relation to their competitors, with two red flags disrupting the second practice and ten rookies on track in the first. In the absence of that knowledge, Russell would rather focus on the positive.
“We didn’t get a completely clear gauge of where our relative pace was in FP1 because there were a lot of rookie drivers out there on the track,” he stated. Nonetheless, Fred performed admirably for the team, and we had a ton of insightful data to review. Again, we were unable to gauge our position relative to our rivals or obtain a realistic sense of our potential pace because FP2 was obviously interrupted.”
Although Leclerc set the fastest time in the second, more representative session of the day, Russell had led the timesheets in the first. Max Verstappen, who nearly got into a collision with the two Mercedes cars in the pit lane, was trailed by Lando Norris, who finished in second place.
British drivers Zak O’Sullivan, 18, and Jake Dennis, 28, made their Formula 1 weekend debuts for Williams and Red Bull, respectively, while Haas gave Ollie Bearman, 18, his second practice appearance. In Mexico, Bearman became the youngest debutant from Britain at a Grand Prix.
Dennis, racing in Verstappen’s Red Bull machine, finished 1.1 seconds behind the lead in 16th place out of 20 runners. Though only a tenth slower than Kevin Magnussen in the other Haas, Bearman finished 20th and last, while O’Sullivan finished eighteenth, seven tenths behind Williams’ Logan Sargeant.
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