Hamilton nearly half a second clear in FP1 in Bahrain

Formula 1’s newly-crowned 2020 world champion Lewis Hamilton topped the opening practice session ahead of this Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

Hamilton’s 1m29.033s on medium tyres left him four and a half tenths clear of Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas, and nearly a second ahead of everyone else.

Hamilton took the early lead by outpacing Bottas by some eight tenths on their early runs on the hard tyre, with the latter hampered by a series of lock-ups at the sharp Turn 10-left hander that left his left front tyre in a sorry state.

And though Bottas then jumped to the front after equipping the 2021 Pirelli C3 tyres, Hamilton was again quicker on the same compound, and a soft-shod Sergio Perez (Racing Point) slotted in between them.

Fresh medium tyres allowed Pierre Gasly to overhaul Hamilton just after the halfway point in the session, but the AlphaTauri driver’s lead was short-lived, with the two Mercedes drivers likewise taking on new yellow-walled tyres and posting the first sub-1m30s laps of the weekend.

This re-established a familiar Mercedes 1-2 out front, and though Gasly’s time would be beaten by Perez and McLaren’s Carlos Sainz Jr, both on softs, the out-of-contract Perez only got to 0.967s off Hamilton.

Under-pressure Red Bull driver Alex Albon had briefly taken the lead after half an hour in FP1, with a time that proved good enough for seventh – just 0.008s behind team-mate Max Verstappen, who had a spin exiting onto the main straight while on the 2021 rubber.

Esteban Ocon vaulted himself into the top 10 in the closing minutes of the session, securing eighth place ahead of Racing Point’s Lance Stroll and his Renault team-mate Daniel Ricciardo.

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc, who had a major spin exiting Turn 1 midway through the session, was compromised by dirty air from Gasly’s AlphaTauri on what should’ve been his and Ferrari’s quickest lap in FP1 late on.

He still managed to improve on that set of softs afterwards, clearing team-mate Sebastian Vettel by four-hundredths of a second for 11th place.

Alfa Romeo’s FP1 stand-in Robert Kubica, driving Kimi Raikkonen’s car, was a superb 13th and nearly two tenths quicker than the team’s regular driver Antonio Giovinazzi. Slotting in between the two Alfas were the two outgoing Haas drivers Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen, the former spinning in a big way through the Turns 5-7 complex and having to crawl back to the pits.

While Gasly and Sainz were in the top five, their respective team-mates Daniil Kvyat and Lando Norris were 17th and 18th, with Kvyat having a marginally faster time erased for track limits and radioing in a plea to race director Michael Masi to abolish them.

Every driver but Williams’s Nicholas Latifi made use of the Pirelli 2021 tyres, of which two sets have been made available for each car. At least one of these two sets will need to be used for at least six laps in the under-the-lights second practice later on Friday.

Latifi was 19th, three tenths ahead of temporary team-mate Roy Nissany, who stood in for George Russell and will now return to his regular Formula 2 duties for the rest of the weekend.

Practice 1 Results