What happened in first Saudi Arabian Grand Prix F1 practice

Ferrari Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc set the pace on the opening practice session of the 2022 season’s second round, the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Key moments

• Verstappen leads most session with hard-tyre lap…
• But Leclerc jumps ahead late on
• Red-flag stoppage for debris
• Magnussen limited to two laps

The session was red-flagged just short of a third of the way through when a braking marker placed 50 metres before Turn 1 fell onto the track and swiftly turned into a pile of debris by Lando Norris’s McLaren, necessitating a stoppage for clean-up.

⏮ REPLAY ⏮

Norris collected the 50m board as he looked to sweep into Turn 1 #SaudiArabianGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/rspnCbadJj

— Formula 1 (@F1) March 25, 2022

A 1m30.888s from Max Verstappen on the hard tyre was enough to vault him to the top spot before the interruption, and though he headed out on softs straight after the red flag he didn’t improve, abandoning his initial attempt and cutting Turn 10 on the follow-up.

Despite Verstappen then switching to what appeared to be higher-fuel running, his hard-tyre effort kept him top until the very final minutes, in which Leclerc finally leapfrogged him with a second attempt on a fresh soft tyre.

Leclerc and team-mate Carlos Sainz had both not run before the debris red flag and therefore delayed their soft-tyre runs, with Sainz – despite reporting a huge amount of bouncing – placing fourth, 0.367s behind Leclerc.

The Spaniard was also behind Verstappen and Alfa Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas, who elevated himself from 10th to third in the closing stages.

Pierre Gasly had spent much of the session in second place for AlphaTauri, despite smacking the wall on his fastest lap. He and team-mate Yuki Tsunoda ended up completing the top six for AlphaTauri.

The other Red Bull of Sergio Perez was the last driver within a second of Leclerc (and Verstappen) in seventh, trailing his team-mate by nearly seventh tenth despite managing to improve on softs.

Mercedes F1 driver Lewis Hamilton was ninth, sandwiched by the two Alpines of Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso and himself reporting “a lot of bouncing”. Hamilton and team-mate George Russell, who was only 15th, frontloaded their fresh-tyre running in the session, immediately switching from one set of softs to another during the red flag. At that point, Russell also swapped a higher-downforce rear wing for the same low-downforce configuration Hamilton spent the session with.

The only team not to run the softs was Haas, which duly took up the last two spots. And while it was a strategic decision for Mick Schumacher, for Kevin Magnussen it was because his session was over after two medium-tyre laps.

Magnussen, fifth in Bahrain, was called into the pits and asked not to shift gears very early on, with Haas subsequently reporting a hydraulic leak and the Dane’s VF-22 spending the rest of the session in the garage.

Practice 1 Results