Thursday Report - Hamilton leads both Friday sessions

Lewis Hamilton
© Mercedes

Lewis Hamilton led both Thursday night practice sessions at the start of the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend, Mercedes making the most of the extremely cold conditions to extract the best out of the Pirelli tyres, as the German team always does in these conditions. McLaren and Ferrari were also very competitive on both sessions, but Red Bull was never close to their lap times, in FP1 because of a strategic choice and, later, on FP2, because the only red flag of the day prevented Max Verstappen and Sérgio Pérez from setting competitive lap times on the Soft tyres.

As expected the track was extremely dirty at the start of FP1, with lap times being almost ten seconds slower than in last year's qualifying, but with all 20 cars running smoothly, the tarmac started to rubber in and by the end of FP2, Hamilton was just over one second slower than the mark achieved by Charles Leclerc when he set pole position for the inaugural event around this street track. Even more significantly, lap times are almost 1.5s faster than in 2023, comparing session to session, showing how much the cars have progressed in the last 12 months.

With a lot of taking being done about Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes being forced to remove skid block protections from the floors of their cars after an FIA Technical Directive clarified the regulations on that area, the three teams seem to have coped very well with the changes. On a very bumpy track they had the fastest cars and it was tyre preparation and the ability to switch them on quickly in extremely cold temperatures that made the difference. In that exercise it was Lewis Hamilton that did the better job, the veteran leading team mate George Russell by nearly 0.4s in FP1 and facing stronger opposition from Lando Norris in FP2, the gap between the two English drivers being just 0.011s. Russell was still in contention, in third place, ahead of the two Ferrari of Sainz and Leclerc, this quintet separated by less than half a second and way clear of the rest of the field.

The most remarkable note of the day was that no driver hit the wall in this very slippery and difficult track and the only red flag of Thursday came out when Alex Albon's Williams stopped shortly after coming out of the pits, 37 minutes into the session, the Thai's car suffering a fuel system issue that had already cost him 30 minutes in the pits but, clearly, to no avail. That red flag came, crucially, when Verstappen and Pérez had finally switched to Soft tyres and had poor initial flying laps. Both had just started new flying laps and were going considerably faster than before but had to abort them. The team then reverted the two cars to the long runs on Medium tyres everyone was already starting to do and that's why Verstappen was down in P17 and Pérez only 19th fastest at the end of the session. Still, Red Bull looked on the backfoot all day, but being the only team to run with two sets of Softs in FP1, with high downforce making the RB20 the slowest on the final sector, before changing the aero settings for FP2 and missing out on a qualifying run certainly made it difficult to fully understand the car's potential around this track.

Continuing his impressive run, Pierre Gasly was best of the rest and up to P6, also making the most of the fact Piastri didn't put a clean lap together on the Softs, the Frenchman beating Magnussen by just 0.035 to lead the midfield. The Dane, like last year, seemed particularly at ease around this track and beat team mate Hulkenberg by 0.132s, but with two cars comfortably inside the top ten this was a very positive start of the weekend for the home team. Yuki Tsunoda completed the top ten in FP2, as VCARB made very positive changes to the set-up of their cars, after being among the slowest in FP1. The Japanese driver was only happy with the balance of his car on his flnal flying lap, where he got ahead of Bottas – always extremely quick when grip levels are low – to claim the final place inside the top ten.