Mark Hughes: Why Mercedes has started so strongly in Vegas

“I feel like I could drive a road car around here faster than that,” said Lando Norris of the experience of going second-fastest in FP2 on the cold, low-grip, desert night Las Vegas Grand Prix track. 

The gripless surface actually had a sheen on parts of the track and in addition to that, very high minimum tyre pressures imposed by Pirelli (for the long straight/cool temperature combination), low-downforce wings for the super-long run down the Vegas strip and a track temperature of around 12C, meant the tyres were almost floating on the surface rather than digging into it.

Drivers reported they couldn’t really feel where the grip limit was, especially under braking, and plenty of use was being made of the escape roads. 

This was all at the same time of evening which qualifying will happen on Friday and although there could be some track improvement as more rubber goes down, it’s likely to be incident-filled. 

At the top of the headline times in both practice sessions was Lewis Hamilton. It’s not the first time the Mercedes has looked good in cool conditions - think Silverstone and Spa - and it did appear to have very good traction.

That has all the hallmarks of a car getting more tyre temperature than the others on a day when that’s very difficult to achieve. “Yes, the car was feeling pretty good,” said a cautious Hamilton, mindful of how the car has many times flattered to deceive on a ‘Friday'.

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“It felt good in FP1, less so in FP2. Let’s see how it is tomorrow. Our race pace is not that great. We need to figure out how to improve that without losing our qualifying pace. But it’s nice to have the car feel like it’s not going to throw me off the track.”

George Russell didn’t put his ideal best lap together but is essentially on the same pace as Hamilton. He made a much better fist than Hamilton of keeping the tyres together in the race sim. 

“Yes, Mercedes has always been a bit more aggressive on the tyres all year,” observed Charles Leclerc, “so that’s probably why they were strong. But we are good on race pace, less good on quali.”

His Ferrari was only fifth fastest around 0.5s off Hamilton, but fastest of all - ahead of team-mate Carlos Sainz - in the race stint simulation runs.

FP2 long-run average on mediums

“This was the lowest grip of any track we’ve been on since Turkey 2020,” said Sainz. “Then the track did begin to build up some grip but then the temperatures fell further as we got into the evening and it came down again. So it was all a bit complicated to track.

“It’s all about having the tyres ready in sector one. From there it can snowball into a very good lap or a bad lap.”

Helped by super-strong straightline speed, the GPS traces show that Sainz was on course for the fastest time until dropping over 0.3s in the last few tight curves, suggesting the rears had actually become too hot by the end of the lap.

Somewhere within that puzzle, the Ferrari is very quick, quite probably the quickest. But can it be accessed?  

As for McLaren, it behaved more like the Mercedes than the Ferrari, with decent single-lap pace but terrible cold graining of the front tyre ruining Norris’s long-run attempt. This was after he had used up an extra set of potentially valuable mediums in FP1 because of graining.

“On low fuel we were OK, but on race pace shocking,” Norris pointed out. “Front graining is always a struggle for me. I’m just not very good at dealing with it. But qualifying up the front always helps with that.”

The McLaren is potentially the fastest through the turns - Norris was almost 10km/h quicker than Hamilton and Sainz through the Turn 12 left-hander that leads onto the back straight - but perhaps some of that will be sacrificed for better race pace. Oscar Piastri’s soft-tyre lap was thwarted by the red flag for Alex Albon’s broken-down Williams so he ended up adrift in eighth.

Worst afflicted by the tyre conundrum was Red Bull, unable to get to that critical temperature threshold at which the tyre begins to work.

Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez had just put on their first set of softs for FP2 when the red flag came out. With time getting tight, they were obliged to get straight into the long runs (on medium tyres). So 17th and 19th in the headline times means nothing.

“We need to understand what to do to get the tyres working,” said Verstappen. “It was just like driving on ice. But if we can do that I think we’ll be OK, because the balance is OK.”

The Red Bull’s straightline speeds were low but any pivot to a lower downforce package could make the tyre problem even more intractable.

There are many puzzles to be solved in the cool desert night.