Considering it was the 19th official day of track action in the 2023 Formula 1 season, Friday at the Spanish Grand Prix felt a lot like a pre-season test day in many respects.
Whether it was the countless new parts on the cars, the sight of Fernando Alonso lining up at the end of the pit lane sporting large aero rakes either side of his Aston Martin, the prototype Pirelli tyres drivers ran in both sessions or the revised final sector to get familiar with, it was a day of discovery for teams and drivers around a track they otherwise know better than any other.But despite what teams learned about both the circuit and their cars from the two hours of running, there is one thing Friday revealed which would have surprised no one – that Red Bull and Max Verstappen remain the car-driver combination to beat this weekend.
The world champion was not just the only driver in the field to creep under the 1’14 barrier, he now holds the honour of setting the fastest ever lap of the Circuit de Catalunya with an average speed of 226.841km/h. While that is ultimately a meaningless statistic given how many iterations of the Barcelona circuit there have been over the years, it does mean that Spanish Grand Prix has gone from an average circuit in terms of lap speed to being firmly in the top half of the fastest tracks on the calendar.
The removal of the chicane also suits Red Bull down to a tee. It’s telling that Verstappen and Red Bull team mate Sergio Perez set the second and third-fastest final sector times of the second practice session, showing the speed that the RB19 has through the final two right-handers. And with both also in the top three positions through the speed trap just before the braking zone for turn one, it’s little surprise the championship leader was happy.
“Overall, I think we had a very good day,” said Verstappen after practice. “The car was in a good window. Of course you try to fine tune a few things here and there, but short-run, long-run, everything looked quite good.”
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“Today was a good day, there is plenty of information for us to look at overnight,” he insisted. “All-in-all, I think there were lots of positives to take but we have to turn up a gear for qualifying.”
And he will have to make sure he picks up the pace on Saturday as the competition behind Verstappen and the Red Bull looks especially fierce. On ultimate pace, the gap between Alonso in second and Pierre Gasly’s tenth-fastest time was just 0.493 with an average separation of just six-hundredths of a second between those positions.
Although Hulkenberg was an impressive third for Haas, he was cautious about his chances of being near the top five in qualifying, assessing that it was more a case of the bigger teams under-performing than of him and Haas over-achieving.
One of those teams was likely Mercedes, who finally got to discover how their major revisions to their W14 from the Monaco Grand Prix last weekend performed around a ‘proper’ race track. The result was eighth for George Russell and 11th for Lewis Hamilton – and a performance that team trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin described as “quite familiar” to the team.
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“Single-lap [pace] needs a bit of work and long run looks okay,” Shovlin concluded. “We’ve got a good idea of what the limitations are in terms of balance and hopefully by the morning, we’ll have come up with a few solutions to those.”
Another team which is likely yet to show its hand is Ferrari. Qualifying pace has been the SF-23’s strength, and tomorrow may reveal whether any of that has been sacrificed through their major car update which is aimed at making it more benign over a race distance.
First is the typical issue of traffic. Last year, the slow speed chicane offered more opportunity for drivers to get out of the way of rivals as they prepared for their push laps. But now closing speeds will be dramatically higher. That could lead to some nervous moments not too dissimilar to those regularly seen at the Red Bull Ring which shares similarities at the end of the lap to Catalunya. Expect penalties to be handed out to any offenders.
The second area of concern is track limits – especially out of the final corner. In Formula 2, pole winner Oliver Bearman came within just centimetres of falling outside the white lines on the exit of the final corner on his pole lap and losing his position. With cars rounding that final corner faster than ever before, keeping momentum onto the straight will be crucial and that will likely lead to close calls with the white lines.
Finally, the risk of rain is growing. The latest forecasts have revised the chance of rain during the qualifying upwards, from 40% to 60%. If it does come, that will only offer more opportunities for drivers in midfield teams to get in the mix with those typically ahead of them in the order. And if that happens, that would throw the grid and likely the race itself wide open.
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Combined practice times
Position | Number | Driver | Team | FP1 time | FP2 time | Gap | Laps |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Max Verstappen | Red Bull-Honda RBPT | 1’14.606 | 1’13.907 | 64 | |
2 | 14 | Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin-Mercedes | 1’15.547 | 1’14.077 | 0.170 | 53 |
3 | 27 | Nico Hulkenberg | Haas-Ferrari | 1’16.461 | 1’14.177 | 0.270 | 59 |
4 | 11 | Sergio Perez | Red Bull-Honda RBPT | 1’15.374 | 1’14.219 | 0.312 | 61 |
5 | 31 | Esteban Ocon | Alpine-Renault | 1’15.418 | 1’14.242 | 0.335 | 57 |
6 | 16 | Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 1’15.694 | 1’14.246 | 0.339 | 59 |
7 | 55 | Carlos Sainz Jnr | Ferrari | 1’15.726 | 1’14.274 | 0.367 | 58 |
8 | 63 | George Russell | Mercedes | 1’15.753 | 1’14.392 | 0.485 | 62 |
9 | 77 | Valtteri Bottas | Alfa Romeo-Ferrari | 1’15.978 | 1’14.448 | 0.541 | 55 |
10 | 10 | Pierre Gasly | Alpine-Renault | 1’15.545 | 1’14.457 | 0.550 | 55 |
11 | 44 | Lewis Hamilton | Mercedes | 1’15.845 | 1’14.549 | 0.642 | 59 |
12 | 81 | Oscar Piastri | McLaren-Mercedes | 1’16.353 | 1’14.583 | 0.676 | 55 |
13 | 24 | Zhou Guanyu | Alfa Romeo-Ferrari | 1’15.906 | 1’14.585 | 0.678 | 52 |
14 | 4 | Lando Norris | McLaren-Mercedes | 1’15.783 | 1’14.694 | 0.787 | 54 |
15 | 20 | Kevin Magnussen | Haas-Ferrari | 1’15.689 | 1’14.713 | 0.806 | 45 |
16 | 21 | Nyck de Vries | AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT | 1’15.504 | 1’14.785 | 0.878 | 60 |
17 | 22 | Yuki Tsunoda | AlphaTauri-Honda RBPT | 1’15.915 | 1’14.840 | 0.933 | 61 |
18 | 18 | Lance Stroll | Aston Martin-Mercedes | 1’15.939 | 1’15.010 | 1.103 | 55 |
19 | 23 | Alexander Albon | Williams-Mercedes | 1’16.630 | 1’15.056 | 1.149 | 59 |
20 | 2 | Logan Sargeant | Williams-Mercedes | 1’16.506 | 1’15.415 | 1.508 | 62 |
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Teams’ progress vs 2022
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sato113 (@sato113)
3rd June 2023, 0:27
A year ago we had the same problem… where is the ‘burger’ menu for this weekend’s race? Usually we have a drop down menu and all the info for the particular race weekend. Annoying needing to sift through pages to find relevant articles @keithcollantine
Jere (@jerejj)
3rd June 2023, 5:52
Max mightn’t have been the only driver getting below 1m14s, but he’s the only one below 1m13s, which is even more note-worthy, but a few others will get there too.
As for the lap-end, yes, traffic indeed could be a similar issue to Red Bull Ring, but track limit-wise, the penultimate corner exit more so than the last because most corner exits, including the last, have gravel beside curbing or otherwise close to the edge, while the penultimate corner exit has a bigger gap between gravel & track edges, so that part could prove track limits issues, which I noted in the FRECA races two weeks ago.