Free Practices of the Australian GP: red flags and rain leave many question marks. Alonso emerges!

The first two free practice sessions on Friday in Melbourne end with Max Verstappen setting the fastest laptime in the first hour, marginally faster than the laptime set by Fernando Alonso in FP2. Below you will find the complete results of both sessions:

The leitmotif of both sessions was a track time loss due to various reasons, mainly red flags and the rain that fell in the last 45 minutes of FP2. It is ironic that precisely on the weekend in which the words of Stefano Domenicali, in favor of the "elimination" of free practices from the current format as not very spectacular, are bouncing all over the media, a series of causes mean that the 10 teams find themselves facing a Grand Prix with very little data collected: the wather forecast is expecting rain for most of the day tomorrow as well, so Sunday's (dry) race will be full of question marks, with possible setup errors by some.

Max re-establishes the hierarchies at Red Bull. The Aston Martin surprise is not over!

After a Grand Prix in Saudi Arabia in which - for reasons unrelated to his performance - Verstappen obrtained less points than his teammate Sergio Perez, in Australia the Dutchman immediately demonstrated his willingness to reverse the situation in his favor again, setting laptimes half a second faster than him, both in FP1 and FP2…

“At home I was really sick, like I could barely walk. It felt like I was just missing a lung, I went into the weekend really believing it was gone”

Max Verstappen

It's crazy to think that Max had endured the last race weekend with rather important physical complications, as he himself revealed…

The most competitive car behind Red Bull in Friday's two sessions overall is once again Alonso's Aston Martin, who capitalized on an uncertain weather situation in FP2, by setting a 1'18"887 in the first few minutes which remained unbeaten. On the Albert Park layout, made faster last year and featuring no less than 4 DRS zones, the Spanish driver's AMR23 is on paper the underdog: the rear axle borrowed from Mercedes on one side, and the "triple DRS" of Red Bull (which we will discuss in more detail in a future article) on the other hand, mean that there is potentially no story on the straights, despite the two competitors are evenly matched in terms of peak aerodynamic load.

Are we starting to see some progresses from Ferrari and Mercedes?

The Ferrari SF-23 lands in Melbourne in a state of technical confusion which they're trying to remedy calmly and orderly, introducing aerodynamic updates that can "broaden" the setup window.

 

Mark Sutton/Motorsport Images

In fact, in the first two rounds we saw how difficult it was for the Ferrari to trade-off the aerodynamic downforce required in the corners with the aero efficiency useful on the straights. From this point of view, the Albert Park layout helps, because it requires fewer setup compromises than, for example, the Bahrain International Circuit. The fact is that, at least on Friday, the best laptimes of Leclerc and Sainz remained between 1'19"3 and 1'19"6, not far from the top. In short, we could see a Ferrari closer to Aston Martin even if - as no team has tried a race simulation - the big unknown factor is tyre degradation, the Achilles' heel of the SF-23 in Jeddah.

 

Mark Sutton/Motorsport Images

At Mercedes, the best laptime of the day was set by Lewis Hamilton, but honestly the overall performance on Friday suggests that his 1'19"223 in FP1 was an exploit linked to the use of soft tyres on a track continuously improving…

This shouldn't come as a surprise, because as the team has already said several times, the W14 will soon be overturned in its shapes, and therefore the aerodynamic development is totally focused on what the new layout of Hamilton and Russell's single-seater will be. In the few GPs that separate us from seeing what we could define as "W14-B" in action, it is understandable that without any upgrades, the pure performance will gradually regress.

Very puzzling midfield, but we're getting used to it!

In the midfield, it is well known that performance is often indecipherable due to its dependence on the nature of the track: here in Melbourne we have seen how the Ferrari-powered teams (namely Haas and Alfa Romeo) are far behind, while McLaren is slowly starting to understand his MCL60 and Williams was victim of technical issues: Logan Sargeant had to stop trackside in FP1 due to electrical problems, as a result of which he missed the entire FP2 session. But the rain, as mentioned, didn't allow its competitors to drive a lot, so "a trouble shared is a trouble halved"!

Want to go into even more detail?

I recently started a collaboration with my fellow content creator Rastro, which many of you will know! Our project is based on making the telemetric analyses from each session available, from FP1 to the race itself… You can find everything on the BuyMeACoffee platform, at a truly competitive price compared to the value they offer in the analysis of a Grand Prix: go have a look!

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