Lando Norris swept Friday practice for the British Grand Prix, outpacing McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri in a complicated end to the first day of track action at Silverstone.
The drizzle that had been falling during FP1 has stopped, but the forecast calls for heavy rain for the final 15 minutes of FP2, which would have halted the crucial single-lap qualifying simulation that traditionally takes place at the end of the session.
Eventually rain started to fall and the race was called off five minutes before the end, but by then the team’s typical Friday night program had been shaken up and compensated for, with the soft tyres starting earlier than usual and the order being reversed due to different fuel loads, so the resulting times are unlikely to be representative of real-world speeds.
Norris dominated the soft compound lap, setting the benchmark with 1m26.549s. The Briton’s afternoon was smooth on his way to the spot, except for a wide moment on the kerb at Copse, after which he was asked to check the floor for damage. Norris is already running the repaired floor and the new McLaren upgrade this weekend after his crash in Austria last weekend.
Piastri was 0.331s behind, but while McLaren will be expected to adapt well to the high-speed Silverstone layout, it was unexpected that the struggling Sergio Perez took fourth for Red Bull Racing. He was 0.434s off the pace but 0.25s quicker than team-mate Max Verstappen.
Even more unpredictable was the fact that Haas finished 0.007 points behind fourth-place Nico Hulkenberg, but the American team’s car improved its drivability this weekend.
Charles Leclerc could probably have made it to the top four, but he lost his fastest lap time on the way from Beckett to Chapel, where he suffered a massive impact over the kerb and lost momentum on the Hangar Straight. He finished 0.601s behind the Ferrari, which was equipped with the new Silverstone spec upgrade package.
Lewis Hamilton took the lead for Mercedes, 0.653s behind, and 0.031s ahead of Verstappen, who was the first driver to fit the soft tyres for qualifying and took a lap when his tyres were less worn than the others, thus taking the loss.
Carlos Sainz, driving Ferrari’s Silverstone update package, took eighth place, 0.7s behind the rest of the field, 0.025s ahead of Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll, who was back in the lead, and 0.045s ahead of George Russell’s Mercedes, who rounded out the top 10.
Fernando Alonso finished 11th, 0.823 seconds behind, ahead of Valtteri Bottas and Alex Albon.
Pierre Gasly, who will start the race at the back of the grid with a new power unit, suspected he had damaged the floor after going off the road at Copse. The Frenchman finished the day in 14th place, ahead of teammate Esteban Ocon, with the pair just 1.2 seconds behind.
Yuki Tsunoda finished 16th ahead of Logan Sargent, Guan Yu Zhou, Daniel Ricciardo and Kevin Magnussen.
