A one-stop race with the McLarens looking favourite? Well, yes - but read on. There were some interesting things happening around Imola on Friday.
The worry for the teams before going into Friday running was whether the debuting Pirelli C6 compound would be too soft to be quicker than the C5 around Imola. Well, they can now relax - as the C6 held up over the lap well enough to be faster than the medium C5. Had that not been the case, qualifying could potentially have been a festival of game theory with most of the allocation being the soft.
So despite the apparently audacious use of Pirelli’s softest combination around a track as demanding as this, things look relatively conventional. The C6 will be a qualifying-only tyre, of course, but will be perfectly adequate in that role.
No one has yet used the hard C4, but the C5 long run numbers suggest this could well be a conventional one-stop race. The pitlane loss here is very big at 27-28s, so even though Pirelli has tried to generate a two-stop race with its choices here, it seems as though the teams’ management of the tyres will still enable the second stop to be avoided in general.
Which is quite startling - given that last year around here the C5 (as the soft) was a disaster and was to be avoided in the race at all costs. Yet here it is (on the upgraded construction) looking capable of doing 40-50% of the distance.
McLaren, as usual, looks the class of the field, with Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris setting the fastest times over a single lap and on the long runs, too - with Piastri fastest in the qualifying simulation, Norris ahead on the long runs.
“I think we’re pretty happy with today,” said Norris. “A difficult track just to get in the rhythm of. It’s fast and is a track all about timing and getting everything perfect, which is not easy to do when you’re going at the speeds that we do. I think we made some improvements and hopefully some more to come for tomorrow.
“I’m sure Oscar is going to find things, too, tomorrow. But in FP2 we always look good, we always look much better than everyone and then we get into qualifying and they catch up.
"I don’t think we’re in a comfortable place, we still have work to do. Alpine were quick, they’ve always been quick here - and I’m sure Red Bull will catch up and Mercedes will be on it when they turn their engines up. So nothing too comfortable but a productive Friday.”
That’s probably a standard Norris 'glass half-empty' reading, but yes, pole position may be up for grabs.
Race pace paints a different picture. Yet is there scope for an outlier like Max Verstappen, George Russell or Kimi Antonelli to steal pole and then stay ahead of a faster McLaren through track position and low deg, as at Suzuka?
The order between the two McLarens is probably less significant than normal as they appeared to be adopting opposite approaches to both the qualifying and race runs in order to find the optimum. Piastri was a quarter-second faster in the first sector of the single lap, Norris gaining all that time back in the final sector.
Similarly, Piastri attacked the beginning the long runs around 0.5s faster than Norris but by the end of the runs that had inverted, giving an advantage to Norris over the stint of 0.09s. They could well have performance in hand now that they’ve established where the thermal limits are.
Long run averages (all on C5 medium)
Norris - 1m19.865s (7 laps)
Piastri - 1m19.954s (9 laps)
Antonelli - 1m20.240s (6 laps)
Leclerc - 1m20.288s (6 laps)
Hadjar - 1m20.351s (6 laps)
Hamilton - 1m20.439s (4 laps)
Sainz - 1m20.440s (6 laps)
Russell - 1m20.683s (6 laps)
Verstappen - 1m20.743s (6 laps)
Albon - 1m20.778s (4 laps)
Over a single lap the McLarens were around a quarter-second clear of a closely-bunched Pierre Gasly (Alpine), Russell (Mercedes), Verstappen (Red Bull) and Charles Leclerc (Ferrari). Treat that secondary order with some caution - as a small offset in fuel load would carry a bigger than usual laptime advantage here.
That said, Gasly’s Alpine did look very nicely balanced and handling the kerbs very well. He was second-fastest only to Piastri in the final sector.
Gauging the Alpine’s competitiveness from the long runs isn’t really feasible either, as Gasly did way more laps than anyone else, making his average unrepresentative.
The Mercedes wasn’t hanging on to its tyre performance as well as the McLaren or Alpine through the final sector but otherwise looked OK – and Antonelli was the quickest non-McLaren in the long runs. At Ferrari both Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were complaining of poor braking and were assured the problem would not be there on Saturday.
It looked to be a pretty typical Red Bull Friday, with Verstappen complaining of an acute lack of grip throughout FP1, then a significant improvement, but still not enough, in FP2. It would be no surprise to see the usual Red Bull set-up rethink brining Verstappen fully into play come qualifying. But on the long runs there is a lot of work to do, even if Red Bull had the PUs turned down.
“We tried a lot of things today,” said Verstappen, who was overtaken by Piastri’s McLaren during the long runs. “Some things worked a bit better than others but, ultimately, we weren’t fast enough.
"We definitely need a bit more work to just get a better through-corner balance to go faster. I think it's the same in the long runs.
"I mean, I got overtaken by the McLarens - so that says enough, right? They pull away. But even then, compared to other teams around us, I think at the moment it was a bit tough today."
Racing Bull invariably runs lighter than the parent team on Friday, so Isack Hadjar’s seventh-fastest time on the same tenth as Verstappen likely flatters the car’s true pace a little – as probably does his fifth-quickest long-run time. Hadjar interrupted the late stages of FP2 with an off at Tamburello but continues to impress.
Franco Colapinto got back into the swing of things in his Alpine after his lay-off, but is around 0.5s adrift of team-mate Gasly at this stage of the weekend.
