Winners and losers from Friday at F1's Japanese GP
As China was a sprint weekend, Friday at the Japanese Grand Prix was only the second full Friday of practice the teams have had with the 2026 Formula 1 cars.
With the caveat that it's 'only practice', here are the early winners and losers emerging from the first day of on-track action.
Loser: Red Bull
Red Bull spent the Chinese GP weekend stuck in the midfield fight, and there’s no evidence so far to suggest Suzuka will be much different.
The midfield fight in FP2
7 Nico Hulkenberg (Audi) +1.308s
8 Alex Albon (Williams) +1.363s
9 Ollie Bearman (Haas) +1.365s
10 Max Verstappen (Red Bull) +1.376s
11 Esteban Ocon (Haas) +1.399s
12 Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls) +1.457s
13 Carlos Sainz (Williams) +1.475s
14 Pierre Gasly (Alpine) +1.601s
15 Isack Hadjar (Red Bull) +1.626s
Verstappen says Red Bull was “just lacking balance, grip” despite trying “two opposites from FP1 to FP2 and both of them not very good”.
He isn’t expecting overnight “miracles”, as even though Red Bull has a strong history of turning miserable Fridays into great Saturdays, it hasn’t proved it can do that turnaround with the RB22 yet. - Josh Suttill
Winner: McLaren
McLaren badly needs a strong weekend after a tough opening couple of events, and it’s started Suzuka in good shape performance-wise, with Oscar Piastri edging ahead of the Mercedes duo on the leaderboard in second practice.
It’s far too early to declare that McLaren’s suddenly a match for Mercedes. After all, Piastri also topped FP2 in Melbourne before Mercedes blew it away in qualifying. And we’re expecting Mercedes to do the same here.
But it’s the margin McLaren has over the third-best team (Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was over seven tenths back), which is the most encouraging for McLaren’s podium hopes, even if Ferrari looks stronger over a race distance - JS
Loser: Lando Norris
The main downside of McLaren’s day was its reigning world champion Lando Norris losing a chunk of second practice to a suspected hydraulic leak, further highlighting McLaren’s vulnerable reliability.
He was understandably downbeat after FP2, saying: “Even FP1, the first part of it was aero running so, even the few laps that I did get was not that representative for me.
“I have data to look at and things, but around a track like this, you just want laps - I don’t care what data I can look at, you just want laps under your belt to give you some confidence and good knowledge… which I got some of at the end but just two or three steps behind at the minute with set-up, with no long running.
“Pretty terrible start to the weekend. We’ve got the night to reset and try and fix some things.” - JS
Loser: Ferrari
Ferrari looked in good shape on the medium tyre, with Charles Leclerc leading Piastri and both Mercedes on that compound, but when the soft tyres went on, the laptime simply didn’t come - for either red car.
Leclerc had some lurid moments, through the Esses in particular; Lewis Hamilton similarly struggled to put three clean sectors together. But it’s not only about car balance. Hamilton suggested Ferrari was losing four tenths to McLaren simply on the run to Turn 1, so the way the car is harvesting and deploying its electrical energy probably also needs work.
Given how disrupted Norris was in FP2, there’s no way he should be jumping ahead of both Ferraris after just two short performance runs on two different tyre compounds, even with a chunk of track improvement. The cars around them were finding almost a second between compounds; the fact Leclerc found nothing more than two tenths medium to soft tells you Ferrari underperformed in FP2. - Ben Anderson
Loser: Arvid Lindblad
Suzuka is always a steep learning curve for rookies, so Arvid Lindblad missing all but one lap in FP2 is a huge loss for F1’s newest driver.
Especially when you consider Lindblad’s second F1 weekend in China was a lot tougher than his first, partly explained by his practice problems there.
He at least had another practice session here at Suzuka where he bagged 29 laps and was 10th, unlike China, which had just one practice session as part of the sprint weekend. But it’s still compromised Lindblad, who on Thursday admitted to being surprised by just how tight Suzuka is in real life.
“For me, the biggest thing was just, it's a lot tighter and narrower than you think. When you do it on the sim, it looks quite wide and you're going quite fast through it, so you think it's quite...it's not that tight because you're going through it at like 220km/h, 250km/h. But then you see it on track and you're like 'Wow, that's actually quite tight',” Lindblad said. - JS
Loser: Audi
On the one hand, Audi is an easy winner as it led the congested midfield - or let’s say, was best of the rest behind McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari - in FP2 with Nico Hulkenberg.
But it was another story on the other side of the garage as Gabriel Bortoleto only got his first proper laps in with just under 10 minutes to go in FP2.
That was because of a delay for a precautionary gearbox change, and it robbed Bortoleto of a significant amount of running as Hulkenberg notched up 27 laps to Bortoleto’s 11.
Bortoleto did jump to 16th with a late push-lap on the soft tyres.
Encouraging speed from Hulkenberg, but replicating that in competitive sessions is another thing - even he pointed to the midfield being closer together than the first two races plus lots of technical issues for others in FP2 - and that won’t matter anyway if the car isn’t reliable.
But the team is confident Bortoleto can rebound, and the gearbox change was at least precautionary. - Jack Benyon
Winner: Williams
Still nowhere near where we expected Williams to be, based on its pre-2026 rules reset bombast, but easily its best start to a race weekend so far this season, despite that weird collision for Alex Albon with Sergio Perez’s Cadillac in FP1 - and a temporary shutdown approaching Turn 1 in FP2.
Albon ended Friday at Suzuka in eighth place, within 0.06s of leading the midfield and only 1.363s off the outright pace. That compares very favourably to being 15th and 2.1s off the pace after Friday practice in Australia, and Sainz finishing sprint qualifying in China 17th and 1.7s off - extracting what he and the team agreed at the time was the maximum the car could do.
Sainz was 13th here, just over a tenth down on Albon, showing how congested the midfield is in Japan. But Sainz was less than pleased with Williams’ long-run, high-fuel pace - which he called a “shocker” and at China level “or even worse than China”, so it's not all good news despite the encouraging headline. - BA
Loser: Alpine
Alpine closed the gap to the front of the midfield in China, but it seems to have reverted back to its Melbourne position at Suzuka so far - with Franco Colapinto in particular cast adrift of the midfield pack.
That seems to be because Alpine’s aero “injury” is hurting it more here with more high-speed corners, which leads to understeer.
“I'm not a big fan of understeer and unfortunately, at the moment it's pretty understeery,” was Pierre Gasly’s summary post-FP2.
There won’t be a proper fix for that until the Miami Grand Prix in May at the earliest, so at Suzuka, Alpine will have to focus on mitigating it as best as possible to have any chance of points.
And Colapinto faces further woe as he's under investigation for weaving down the straight before 130R at half-speed while Verstappen was on a flying lap, and had to bail out of his lap. - JS
