Winners and losers from COTA's Friday F1 action
After a triple-header of races, which culminated in a condensed sprint weekend - followed by a weekend off, Formula 1 teams should be delighted to be back to a typical three-practice weekend.
Only, most of them aren't, because the difficult of setting ride-height correctly on this bumpy circuit on a weekend of so many upgrades and car tweaks has made for a lot of grumpy people in the paddock.
Here's our winners and losers from the practice day.
Loser: Lando Norris (7th)
Sounds as though there might be a bit of a disconnect here between how McLaren feels its Austin Friday went and how its world champion driver feels its Austin Friday went.
Lando Norris was properly quick in FP1, within 0.25s of the pace, and in the FP2 long runs looked reasonable, but the qualifying simulations were a disaster - so much so that he actually went slower (by just under a tenth) in FP2 than he managed in FP1.
The major caveat is that big lock-up Norris had at Turn 15, which came shortly after he’d set the best second sector time of all.
But this is at the crux of it all really. There’s no doubt the McLaren can be a fast car, Norris just maintains it’s “very difficult to drive” and too much on a knife’s edge to be able to readily access that level of performance.
“Like it has been for a long time, it's just too difficult to be able to be consistent, to get a nice feeling consistently,” he added. “The pace is not bad, it's just very difficult to achieve it.
“To get the car to be quick, we just have to try so hard to be perfect, and you cannot be perfect. I'm sure everyone has similar problems in a way, but we're just not quick enough yet, easily, to be there consistently.” - Ben Anderson
Winner: McLaren (7th & 8th)
What on earth is McLaren doing in our winners' section when Norris was so downbeat and both cars ended FP2 behind a Racing Bulls, you ask?
That's down to the mood higher up at McLaren, which seems a whole lot brighter than Norris's outlook.
Chief technical officer Rob Marshall spoke of the "really small parts" that McLaren has brought to Austin offering a "measurable benefit" that also made a noticeable laptime difference.
That measurable benefit has included an aerodynamic gain with its brake changes, including flow conditioning around the wheels and wake control.
All that led Marshall to conclude that McLaren is in the fight with its main rivals here.
"Going forward from here we've got to be quite optimistic really," he said. - Jack Cozens
Winner: Charles Leclerc/Ferrari (1st)
An obvious choice of course, considering he topped both Friday sessions, but Leclerc didn’t just look rapid on the soft tyre in FP2.
It looked as though that pace came readily to hand, and the fact he was over six tenths clear of Ferrari team-mate Lewis Hamilton - who had two stabs at a qualifying simulation and set roughly the same lap time on each go - suggests it’s Leclerc in particular who’s got things hooked up for Ferrari in the early phase of this weekend.
The big proviso is the long-run pace, where usually Ferrari would feel its inherent strength lies this season. Has Leclerc’s rapid one-lap speed come at too much of a compromise for tyre degradation? And of course, the perennial question of whether Ferrari can keep up the pace when the engines get turned up for Saturday’s qualifying showdown.
"I think we started the weekend on the right foot with a good balance and I think that is probably the outstanding thing for this Friday," Leclerc said.
"But I also believe the others will start pushing a bit more their cars as they always do coming [into] quali, and so it's going to be tough because it's been a very clean Friday on my side.
"There's more performance in the car, a little bit more, but the others seems to be gaining more than us from the Friday to the Saturday, and seeing the little gap there is... it's not going to be so easy tomorrow." - BA
Winner: Aston Martin (16th & 17th)
Chief trackside officer Mike Krack spoke on Thursday of a need to "manage your expectations a little bit better" in the wake of Aston Martin's misplaced Singapore GP confidence. Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, was quietly talking up the chances of "nice surprises" at the US GP.
Based on Friday practice, Alonso was right to have some optimism. Inside the theoretical Q2 cutoff in both sessions (and up in the dizzying heights of 12th in FP1), with team-mate Lance Stroll for company both times, the Aston Martin looks like a genuine midfield contender again.
Yes, that's still a sign of how the mighty have fallen for a team that so much is expected of, on a day where Adrian Newey spoke of the disappointment Honda was likely to be feeling over its 2026 F1 engine progress.
But in the context of this painful campaign, this was one of the more painless Fridays. - JC
Loser: Isack Hadjar (9th)
OK, run plans, fuel loads and especially at COTA, lap deletions all play a part, but Isack Hadjar failed to get within a second of his Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen in either practice and called his car's handling disgusting.
Asked to explain his "disgusting" radio comments after practice, Hadjar said "it's just a disaster".
He explained: "From sector one to the end of the lap, I was slower [on the softs] than on the medium. It was just undrivable and I was losing the front end massively. We need to have a look because that's not normal, why is there so much deg on one lap?"
Asking the journalists certainly won't provide the answer, Isack... - Jack Benyon
Loser: Williams (20th & 22nd)
After being the first team to blatantly and vocally switch its focus from 2025 to get ready for 2026, to be among the first teams to do that two years in a row is the most almighty of damning indictments for where Williams is at.
It was so sure its car would be terrible at Austin that it ran an unusual strategy of compromising this weekend competitively to try to learn how to fix the issues it's having with its handling.
Even Aston Martin - well over four seconds off the pace at the start of the season - didn't admit a switch of focus to 2027, and basically built a new car, which by some stats could have been on pole for the last two races with a different engine.
Anyway, if ruining this weekend gives Williams a huge insight into its troubles for next year, of course it will be worth it it. Until then, it has to suffer the indignity of very publicly having to admit defeat with a 2026 car it was supposed to have a great headstart with. - JB
Winner: Liam Lawson (6th)
Liam Lawson managed to jump both McLarens in FP2, and while that's unlikely on Sunday and perhaps as much down to what was going on with McLaren, it's still a sign the Racing Bulls is working well.
Lawson says "overall the car is in a good place" and that it's "nice to see it working" given the "new stuff" on the car.
More deg than expected and a likely resurgent Nico Hulkenberg - whose Audi team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto beat the Racing Bulls in FP1 but has a grid penalty on Sunday, while Hulkenberg only got new parts in FP2 and is expecting a driveability fix on Saturday - means Lawson isn't out of the woods yet.
And we've seen on more than one occasion this year a Racing Bulls produce an excellent practice lap which doesn't translate into race performance. But that being said, Friday was a good day for Lawson. - JB
Winner: Cadillac (19th & 21st)
No, this isn't based on Valtteri Bottas's 19th place in FP2 ahead of both Williams. But it is based on the way he characterised the day.
"I think we've got the most done that we've ever done in one Friday," said Bottas, who called this something of a test day - but one that ran smoothly and better than expected.
Cadillac still expects this to be a tough weekend; degradation and tyre heating, as Bottas put it, is "definitely not our strength" and that was apparent on Friday. And Cadillac's productiveness also means "it's going to be a busy evening, because like I said with both cars we've tried a lot of different things". (Team-mate Sergio Perez ran an experimental floor, with 2027 in mind, while Bottas ran different front wings and tried different roll stiffnesses.)
Those experimental ideas (which Colton Herta also ran in FP1) were done "to challenge our thinking on the aero concept of the car", as per chief racing officer Marc Hynes, as well as to validate the correlation between Cadillac's CFD and windtunnel work and what it's seeing in the real world.
Based on this reception, it's been a positive Friday's work. - JC
