Practice 1 Report - Stroll fastest ahead of Piastri

Lance Stroll
© Aston Martin Racing

Lance Stroll set the fastest time right at the end of the only Practice Session for the Chinese Grand Prix, ahead of Oscar Piastri and the two Red Bull of Max Verstappen and Sérgio Pérez. But with the teams needing to prepare two qualifying sessions and two races in just 60 minutes, there were many different programs being done and the final time sheets doesn’t reflect the relative competitiveness of the ten teams around the Shanghai circuit.

The drivers were skeptical about the level of grip they were going to find after they discovered that rather than a new tarmac, they were faced with a treated old tarmac, with adhesive paint being laid in some parts of the track to increase grip levels – a technique used in karting but hardly ever on race circuits for cars – and the truth is that, initially, the track was quite slippery, as Pérez had big moments in the faster corners.

As expected, though, with more rubber being laid down the grip levels improved quite a lot, and Stroll’s fastest time was over three seconds faster than had been achieved at the start of the session – with a lot more to come for this afternoon’s qualifying shootout.

A bizarre incident forced a seven minutes stoppage of the session, when the grass on the inside of Turn 7 caught fire and it was necessary to interrupt the running to allow the marshals to reach that point of the track and extinguished the small fire. While there was no visual confirmation of the reason for that fire, it’s believed parts of a very hot engine cover flew off a car and landed on that very dry grass, igniting it quite quickly.

With the teams running very different programs all three compounds were run right from the start of the session, Ferrari and Alpine going out with Soft tyres, Red Bull, Haas, Williams and Sauber with Mediums, while Mercedes, Aston Martin, McLaren and Racing Bulls opted to start the session with the harder compound.

Only five drivers used more than one set of tyres in this session – Piastri, Pérez, Verstappen, Norris and Sargeant – as with the rules for the Sprint event reducing the number of sets available for eash driver, the majority of the teams opted to keep their optoins open for the rest of the weekend.

There was clearly an issue with lack of grip in the pit entry, as both Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri were unable to negotiate the sharp left turn that leads into the pits and went straight, fortunately without hitting anything. Earlier, Hamilton had a bizzare entry when he was forced into the pit lane as he was trying to go around the outside of Piastri’s McLaren into the last corner only to find the Australian hadn’t backed off. To avoid an incident Hamilton went straight but did it on the inside of the limiting white line and that led to the Mercedes driver being shown the black and white flag.

While there was little grip to start with, it was noticeable there was virtually no degradation for all drivers running with the Medium and Hard compound tyres, but the story changed once the majority moved to the softer compound, as the front tyres showed evidence of a beginning of degradation as they completed their runs.

Ferrari was the only team to complete the session with one set of Soft tyres per driver, doing no qualifying runs but working on set-up the whole session, including a few laps, later in the session, with both drivers on the fuel load necessary to complete the Sprint Race – around 30 kilos.

The fact they continued to run in competitive times showed the tyre degradation of the SF-24 was minimal, which bodes well for the Scuderia looking at the rest of the weekend.

There were minor technical issues for both Albon and Gasly, the Thai aborting his last run to allow the Williams mechanics more time to fix the problem, while the Frenchman did all the laps planned but complained “I learned nothing” as he came into the pits at the end of the session.