Winners and Losers from Austrian GP Friday Practice
A commanding Mercedes sweep, a rookie who turned heads, and a legacy team in freefall — the Red Bull Ring delivered a Friday of stark contrasts. Here is who left Spielberg with momentum, and who is reaching for the reset button.
Friday practice at the Austrian Grand Prix is often a deceiver. The short lap — 4.318 kilometres and barely 65 seconds in a modern Formula 1 car — compresses the field and flatters the mediocre. But when the margins tell a story as lopsided as the one that unfolded across FP1 and FP2, the signal cuts through the noise. Some teams arrived in Spielberg with a car that sings. Others brought one that simply refuses to cooperate.
Kimi Antonelli’s double-topping performance — a 1:07.796 in the morning, sharpened to a searing 1:07.014 in the afternoon — was the headline. But the real intrigue lies in the gaps behind him. McLaren are lurking. Red Bull are searching. And Aston Martin are, by any honest measure, lost.
Here are the winners and losers from an eventful opening day in the Styrian mountains.
Winners
Kimi Antonelli
The championship leader arrived in Austria with a point to prove after a subdued Barcelona weekend by his own lofty standards. He leaves Friday having delivered the most emphatic practice performance of his season. Antonelli was the only driver to break the 1:07s barrier in FP2, and his 1:07.014 was not merely the fastest lap of the day — it was a lap that suggested he had margin in hand. GPS traces revealed he carried over 8 km/h more apex speed through Turns 6 and 7 than any rival. When a driver makes a short circuit look long, the field should be concerned.
Mercedes-AMG
George Russell backed up Antonelli with a P2 in FP1, just 0.040 seconds shy, before slipping to seventh in FP2 on a scruffy soft-tyre effort. But the bigger picture is this: Mercedes have found a mechanical sweet spot at the Red Bull Ring that their rivals are still chasing. The car’s traction out of Turn 3 — a critical launch point onto the long straight — and its composure through the uphill left-right complex of Turns 6 and 7 hints at a team that has solved a rear-end instability that plagued them earlier in the season. Whether they can sustain it through qualifying is the question; that they arrived with it is a statement.
McLaren
Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris finished second and third in FP2, and Piastri’s FP1 third-place effort — set on the medium compound, just 0.117 seconds off Antonelli’s soft-tyre benchmark — was arguably the most intriguing lap of the morning. McLaren’s long-run simulations on the yellow-walled tyres were consistent and competitive, suggesting the papaya cars may hold the stronger hand for Sunday. Norris, who aborted multiple soft-tyre runs in FP1 and finished a muted seventh, rebounded with controlled pace in the afternoon. McLaren did not grab the headlines — they grabbed the data. That often matters more.
Arvid Lindblad
Six young drivers took part in Formula 1’s mandated rookie session. Only one finished within a second of the ultimate pace. Arvid Lindblad, the 18-year-old Red Bull junior, delivered a composed 1:08.726 for Racing Bulls — 0.930 seconds off Antonelli and comfortably ahead of full-time drivers like Nico Hülkenberg, Pierre Gasly, and Alexander Albon. In a car that is not expected to trouble the top ten, Lindblad’s performance was a quiet revelation. Red Bull’s driver programme has its next name circled in ink.
Franco Colapinto
Colapinto placed eighth in FP1 and backed it up with another eighth in FP2 — a rare display of consistency on a day when several bigger names oscillated wildly. The Argentine extracted the maximum from his Alpine across both compounds and both sessions, and his 1:08.142 in FP2 placed him ahead of Bearman, Gasly, and both Williams cars. In a midfield defined by fine margins, Colapinto delivered the kind of clean, unspectacular Friday that teams build race weekends around.
Losers
Aston Martin
There are off-weekends, and then there is whatever Aston Martin endured on Friday. Fernando Alonso — a two-time world champion, one of the most complete drivers in the sport’s history — finished dead last in FP1, 3.537 seconds adrift of Antonelli. Jak Crawford, the team’s rookie substitute, fared marginally better in 20th at +3.406 seconds. The AMR26 struggled for tyre temperature across both sessions, and both Alonso and Lance Stroll failed to escape the bottom third of the timesheets in FP2. The team has cited an impending upgrade package, but the underlying issues appear fundamental. A car this far adrift at a short, power-sensitive circuit is not lacking a part — it is lacking a concept.
Sergio Pérez & Cadillac
Cadillac arrived in Spielberg with a “significant” upgrade package that required breaking the overnight curfew to optimize. The early returns were encouraging — Valtteri Bottas placed a respectable 13th in FP1 — but the story soured when Pérez ground to a halt on the run-up to Turn 3 in the final two minutes, triggering the session-ending red flag. The suspected ECU failure consigned the Mexican to the garage for the majority of the second half of FP1; he completed just 14 laps. Pérez returned for FP2 without incident, but the lost mileage means Cadillac’s upgrade package enters Saturday largely unvalidated — a handicap no midfield team can afford.
Red Bull Racing
Max Verstappen has won four of the last six Austrian Grands Prix. The Red Bull Ring is, by any historical measure, his circuit. But the RB22 is not behaving like its predecessors. Verstappen finished FP1 fourth at +0.281 seconds and FP2 fourth again at +0.550 seconds — half a second off the lead at a track where Red Bull’s aerodynamic efficiency has traditionally shone. His visible frustration through the middle sector told the story: the car is unpredictable at corner entry, and the snap oversteer that plagued him in Barcelona resurfaced through Spielberg’s fast right-handers. If Red Bull’s engineers cannot unlock overnight gains, Verstappen faces the prospect of his first start outside the top three at this circuit since 2021.
Ferrari
Lewis Hamilton arrived in Austria riding the momentum of a Barcelona victory. He leaves Friday six-tenths off the pace and openly frustrated with his car’s rear-end stability through the high-speed right-handers. The seven-time champion placed fifth in both sessions but was never genuinely in the fight at the sharp end. Charles Leclerc, back in the cockpit after ceding FP1 to Dino Beganovic, fared slightly worse — sixth in FP2 at +0.710 seconds. Ferrari’s latest power unit upgrade, debuted in FP1 with Beganovic, may eventually deliver gains, but the chassis’ underlying nervousness on a circuit that punishes rear instability is the more pressing concern.
Williams
Alexander Albon finished 16th in FP1, a full 1.848 seconds off the pace, and the situation did not materially improve in FP2. Luke Browning, the team’s FP1 rookie, placed 18th at +2.183 seconds. Williams arrived in Austria without major upgrades and left Friday without a single representative lap time inside the top fifteen. The Grove outfit’s season has been defined by occasional flashes of midfield competitiveness; Friday was a reminder that those flashes remain the exception, not the norm.
The Bigger Picture
Friday practice sessions are rarely definitive, but they are always directional. The direction at the Red Bull Ring points toward a Mercedes-McLaren duel for pole, with Red Bull and Ferrari chasing answers from different corners of the performance envelope. Behind them, Alpine and Haas are quietly assembling respectable weekends while Aston Martin and Williams face existential questions about their cars’ fundamental pace.
“We have the car in a window we haven’t found at this circuit for years. But Friday means nothing if we don’t convert it tomorrow.” — Toto Wolff, Mercedes Team Principal
The forecast for Saturday carries a risk of isolated late-afternoon thunderstorms — conditions that could scramble the established order and reward the teams that have done their wet-weather preparation. If rain arrives during qualifying, the winner-loser ledger from Friday will be rewritten in a matter of minutes.
Saturday Schedule
FP3: 12:30 CEST · Qualifying: 16:00 CEST. Track temperatures are expected to rise slightly, with a 40% chance of thunderstorms in the late afternoon window. Mercedes enter the day as favourites, but the margin between the top three teams is narrow enough that a single mistake — or a single inspired lap — could reshuffle the grid.
Sources
- Formula1.com — FP2 Report: Antonelli Sets the Pace
- The Race — What Happened in First Practice at the Austrian GP
- PlanetF1 — Full FP1 Results and Classification
- PlanetF1 — Verstappen and Norris Problems as Mercedes Top FP1
- BBC Sport — 2026 Austrian Grand Prix Results
- FIA / Formula1.com — Official Practice 2 Classification
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