First practice for the Mexico Grand Prix saw five rookies take to the wheel, but the 60-minute session didn’t go smoothly for two drivers.

Oliver Bearman took charge of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez but was involved in a tangle with Alex Albon midway through the session.

Albon was charging in his Williams when coming up on the slower-moving Ferrari in the mid-sector Esses but, when about to pass, lost the rear end of his car on the inside kerb and swiped the side of Bearman’s machine, leaving both stranded with terminal damage.

But with that incident still ongoing, Robert Shwartzman – who was controlling Zhou Guanyu’s Sauber for the session – went past Yuki Tsunoda’s RB as the Japanese slowed down, triggering an investigation.

The stewards found the Ferrari junior guilty of overtaking under yellow flags, explaining: “Following the incident at T9 Shwartzman passed a single waved yellow, and a double yellow flag before overtaking Tsunoda in the yellow zone while traveling at speed.

“The penalty is the usual penalty for passing under a double yellow, and while the Stewards recognize that the driver is not scheduled to start the race, they have applied the consistent penalty.”

Shwartzman joins Button on unusual waiting list

Jenson Button, McLaren MCL32

Photo by: Sutton Images

That consistent penalty is a grid drop of five positions for the next F1 race Shwartzman participates in.

However, with the grid almost completely filled for next season and Shwartzman not in the running for any of the remaining vacant seats, it is unlikely he will be able to take that penalty, unless he is called upon in a reserve capacity, like Bearman has on two occasions this year for both Ferrari and Haas.

It is a situation that mirrors one Jenson Button experienced in 2017 when substituting for Fernando Alonso at the Monaco Grand Prix that year.

With the Spaniard competing in the Indianapolis 500, Button came out of retirement to join Stoffel Vandoorne for the Woking-based outfit but during the race, he pitched Pascal Wehrlein into the barriers at Portier.

The stewards then gave the Briton a three-place grid penalty but, where his situation differs to Shwartzman, the incident report explained that punishment was for the “next race he participates in this season”, whereas the latter’s punishment is less descriptive.

All in all, the opening day of track running at the 2024 Mexico Grand Prix was a frustrating affair for pretty much everyone – except, arguably, Ferrari.

The Scuderia did lose much of FP1 when Ollie Bearman was driving Charles Leclerc’s SF-24, thanks to Alex Albon crashing into the 19-year-old when coming across him in the elongated Esses complex. But when it comes to the times that matter (and there where very few of them to be found on Friday) Ferrari at least showed very well.

Pirelli’s 2025 tyre test took over FP2, with five teams (McLaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Sauber) set to get an extra 30 minutes of running for running rookie drivers in FP1. But this was ruined by George Russell’s big FP2 crash, which put a massive dent in Mercedes’ day given it had started so well with the Briton leading the opening session.

Having had poor weather frustrate much of its other tyre testing at non-race events in 2024, Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola was left wondering if organising a test at Lourdes was the only way to get its luck to change on such things.

At Red Bull, an engine issue aboard Max Verstappen’s car meant his day was pretty much pointless. His title rival Lando Norris’s McLaren squad therefore had the smoothest run of the frontrunners, but then had its Right of Review petition into his Austin penalty rejected well after darkness had fallen on Friday.

Here then, is everything we learned at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on the opening day.

Bearman was one of five FP1 rookie drivers in action, but his outing was cut short by a crash with Albon

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The story of the day

The most interesting element of FP1 was set to be the rookie drivers aboard the cars above, before one of them – Bearman – was involved in one of the day’s two big crashes.

This was after a first FP1 red flag had occurred when signage from a bridge running across the track’s main straight had been collected by Verstappen (who suffered minor floor damage) and Andrea Kimi Antonelli in Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes.

Albon lost the rear of his Williams as he lifted off coming across the slower-moving Bearman in Leclerc’s Ferrari at Turn 9 during the early stages. He then smashed into the Ferrari’s left-front corner and did even more damage to his own Williams in the barriers at Turn 10 – such was the speed Albon spun at – that he later missed FP2 entirely.

Russell topped FP1 with a 1m17.998s ahead of Sainz in the remaining Ferrari by 0.317s. Red Bull’s session was marred by Verstappen reporting “something [was] wrong” with his engine and stopping his running five minutes early.

On the 2024 mediums, which in our assessment only concerns Ferrari and Mercedes, the scarlet squad led a not very close comparison of 1m21.357s vs 1m22.371s

In FP2, that engine issue – said to be a “leak somewhere”, by Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko – reoccurred aboard the world champion’s RB20. That was even after Red Bull thought it had solved the issue during the break between practice sessions and around the long red-flag caused by Russell’s crash.

Verstappen therefore only completed four laps in FP2. Russell only did that total too, having lost the rear of his W15 at Turn 8 when he appeared to drag his right-rear too far over the inside kerbs and so his car bottomed out and he was pitched into a spin that ended smashed sideways into the Turn 9 barriers.

These took nearly 25 minutes to rearrange and so the added 30 minutes of FP2 for the Pirelli test was lost. Either side of the stoppage, Sainz improved the first-place benchmark from 1m17.809s to 1m17.699s and was trailed by Oscar Piastri’s McLaren by 0.178s.

Russell suffered his second heavy crash in just over a week after his qualifying shunt in Austin

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The lost time meant while the rookie-running teams did get out on the weekend’s medium tyres (having used a combination of 2024 C4s and C5s, 2025 versions of those compounds, plus a prototype C6 only given to Williams and RB for the Pirelli test) they could only do so for a handful of laps at the end.

Norris did use his mediums to rise to fifth in the final FP2 order, while the five rookie-runners were the only drivers able to conduct practice starts in the session.

The decision over McLaren’s Right of Review then took over as the main story on Friday night, as, nearly six hours after the hearing with Austin stewards commenced, the decision was announced that it had been rejected.

This centred on how the stewards felt McLaren’s argument that an error had been made in Norris being penalised as the attacking car when he was so far ahead of Verstappen that he became the defender when the Dutchman shot his Red Bull to the Turn 12 apex – critical under the current racing guidelines – was “unsustainable”.

What the (limited) data tells us

FP2 long-run data is usually fraught with peril when it comes to interpreting how the teams have stacked up in opening practices, but given the Pirelli test dominated the second session on Friday it means they must be treated with even more caution than usual.

Although the run plans Pirelli mandated means we can know how much fuel was aboard each car during a long run on some 2024 tyres (we’re only looking at the top four teams here), the drivers needing to adjust their approaches and deal with jumping between new and old tyre constructions means they cannot be considered fully representative.

The run plans for the Pirelli test were two performance fliers over five laps with 20kg of fuel aboard for each car, plus two 10-lap stints with 100kg – the second of which were slightly shortened as a result of the red flag (from 12 to eight).

Norris, on the Pirelli test tyres, was one of the few drivers to make it out on the mediums late in FP2

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

On the 2024 mediums, which in our assessment only concerns Ferrari and Mercedes, the scarlet squad led a not very close comparison of 1m21.357s vs 1m22.371s. Leclerc’s second Pirelli long-run (after he’d done a stint on the 2025 mediums) had him ahead of Hamilton by an average of 1.014s.

In other positive news for Ferrari, and this is important given Pirelli said “teams will have to prepare their cars for qualifying and the race in the space of two hours: FP1 on Friday and FP3 on Saturday” in its press release explanation of how the tyre test would work, Sainz edged the long runs all of top teams completed at FP1’s end.

His average on the hards came in at 1m22.150s, which is another healthy 1.061s ahead of Russell’s best for Mercedes (Antonelli was still doing staccato runs at this stage so not assessed). This points to a fairly hefty fuel discrepancy between Ferrari and Mercedes at that point in the opening session.

Given the aberration of the Pirelli test in FP2 this weekend, extra premium is now placed on nailing set-ups in Saturday’s FP3 offering, as well as gathering extra long-run information

McLaren was third-best on the hards with a 1m23.332s, while Verstappen’s woes meant Perez’s FP1-concluding long-run represented Red Bull’s entry at 1m23.392s.

Looking at the FP2 efforts on the 2024 C5s (the softs used for the rest of this weekend), McLaren edged Red Bull with a 1m21.800s from Norris versus Perez’s 1m22.353s.

Given the aberration of the Pirelli test in FP2 this weekend, extra premium is now placed on nailing set-ups in Saturday’s FP3 offering, as well as gathering extra long-run information. Any team that has a crash in the ultra-low-downforce, thin-air challenge here – or has any more reliability maladies – will be in serious trouble.

A truncated day of running, but the early signs are showing positively for Ferrari

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Alex Albon chose not to blame Oliver Bearman for their Mexico Grand Prix FP1 clash, and felt that Ferrari told its reserve driver too late that the Williams Formula 1 driver was approaching.

Albon came across Bearman on the run-up to the high-speed sequence of Turns 7-8-9 and lifted off in anticipation of encountering the Ferrari. This caused his FW46 to lose grip and it began to snap, resulting in Albon swiping Bearman at Turn 9 and subsequently ending up in the wall at Turn 10.

In the immediate aftermath, Albon was heard to refer to Bearman as an “idiot” over the radio. However, the Anglo-Thai driver changed his thoughts on the incident.

Instead, he feels that Ferrari could have done more to warn Bearman – running as an FP1 rookie driver for Austin winner Charles Leclerc – of the situation, and that the young Briton was caught out by the faster closing speeds in F1.

“I think he got told, listening to the radio, very late that I was coming up behind him,” Albon said.

“He tried his best to speed up into the two or three high-speed corners, we caught each other at the worst moment on track that you can.

“I think there was a 100km/h difference in terms of speed. I don’t blame myself, but I don’t think it’s all on Ollie.

“I think he could have been told a bit better, and of course he’s new, the closing speeds in F1 are much higher than F2. But it’s not his fault.”

The incident was investigated by the stewards, but deemed to be not worthy of further action; the report stated that “both drivers agreed that Bearman’s positioning was not unreasonable, but was unfortunate as it was close to Albon’s line. Had Bearman been slightly further down the track it would not have resulted in an incident. All parties agreed that it was a racing incident.”

Following the severe damage to his Williams, Albon did not take part in the second practice session as extensive repairs continued throughout the run-time of the session.

Reflecting on the lost running, Albon said that he hoped the use of FP2 as a Pirelli tyre test would mitigate the damage to his weekend, as drivers participating ran with unmarked 2025 prototype tyres.

“Two laps is frustrating – we’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow,” Albon added.

“But hopefully [FP2 is] less important than a normal weekend, obviously FP2 was a Pirelli test. So in some ways, possibly less learned from other teams because they weren’t running tyres from this year.

“I’m hoping that it just means the lack of track time is less compromising.”

Enea Bastianini cruised to his second Saturday success of the MotoGP season as he saw off feuding title rivals Jorge Martin and Francesco Bagnaia to win the Thailand Grand Prix Sprint race at Buriram.

The factory Ducati rider capitalised on a scuffle between Pramac’s Martin and team-mate Bagnaia at the first corner to grab the lead of a race he would control right to the chequered flag.

He led home Martin in second place, the Spaniard getting the better of title rival Bagnaia to eke his overall advantage out to 22 points with Sunday’s full-length encounter still to come.

The race outcome would be largely assured moments after the start when Martin’s deep inside line into turn one sent him wide on the exit, taking Bagnaia out to the run-off with him and allowing Bastianini to slice past both on the long run to the hairpin.

Once in front Bastianini would assert his control to open up an early half-second advantage that he would extend out to a winning margin of 1.5s.

If Bastianini had it relatively easy out front, then Martin by contrast was made to work hard for second after slipping down to fifth place behind Bagnaia in the wake of their turn one skirmish.

Nevertheless, after disposing of Pedro Acosta and Marc Marquez, Martin set to work on relieving Bagnaia of second and duly succeeded with a well-judged overtake coming through the flip-flop at turns 10 and 11.

From here Martin would have the measure of his rival to hold position to the flag and nudge his advantage up with five races of the season remaining, including two sprints.

Enea Bastianini, Ducati Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

In fourth, Marquez faded from the podium battle after a bright start, the Gresini rider having plenty in hand over brother and team-mate Alex Marquez in fifth after Acosta low-sided out of the position on lap four.

His exit allowed Ducati to lock out the entire top eight with Franco Morbidelli (Pramac), Marco Bezzecchi and Fabio di Giannantonio (both VR46) taking sixth, seventh and eighth respectively, with KTM’s Brad Binder the only point-scorer on alternative machinery in ninth.

MotoGP Thailand GP – Sprint results

McLaren has said it disagrees with the FIA’s decision to reject its right of review request over Lando Norris’s United States Grand Prix penalty and wants to “understand how teams can constructively challenge decisions”.

The Woking-based team had argued that the stewards made an incorrect call in handing Norris a penalty late in the Austin race, which dropped him behind F1 world title rival Max Verstappen to fourth in the results.

Norris overtook Verstappen on the outside of Turn 12 with four laps to go, but as Verstappen’s driving ensured both cars ended going off-track, Norris was given a five-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage.

The crux of the matter for McLaren came down to it arguing Norris was ahead of Verstappen when they both ran off-track and therefore the Red Bull driver was the one on the attack – with the original decision judging the British driver as the attacking driver.

According to F1’s racing guidelines, Verstappen becoming the attacker would have meant the Dutchman was required to leave Norris space on the exit of the corner, which he didn’t need to do as the defender.

But in order to get its right of review to the next stage, McLaren first needed to produce evidence that was new, significant, relevant and not available at the time of the decision, four criteria judged by the FIA stewards.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, battles with Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB20

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

This type of evidence usually involves some sort of camera angle or telemetry data that isn’t available at the time, but in this case McLaren – rather philosophically – offered the stewards’ initial verdict itself, in which it felt they erroneously referred to Norris as the attacker, as the piece of evidence.

The FIA officials dismissed this as “not sustainable”, stating the alleged error itself cannot be accepted as the element to demonstrate said error.

The matter is now closed and cannot be appealed further, but while McLaren disagreed with the FIA’s rejection it said it will work with the governing body to understand how to “constructively” challenge future decisions.

“We acknowledge the Stewards’ decision to reject our petition requesting a Right of Review,” McLaren said in a team statement.

“We disagree with the interpretation that an FIA document, which makes a competitor aware of an objective, measurable and provable error in the decision made by the stewards, cannot be an admissible “element” which meets all four criteria set by the ISC, as specified in Article 14.3.

“We would like to thank the FIA and the stewards for having considered this case in a timely manner.

“We will continue to work closely with the FIA to further understand how teams can constructively challenge decisions that lead to an incorrect classification of the race.”

The FIA stewards did agree with McLaren that currently a right of review procedure must clear an “extremely high bar” to be deemed admissible, with previous efforts by McLaren (Canada 2023), Aston Martin (Saudi Arabia 2023) and Ferrari (Australia 2023) all unsuccessful.

“Whether that should be the case or not, however, is a matter for the regulator (i.e. the FIA) and not the Stewards, whose role is to apply the regulations in a fair and independent manner,” they concluded.

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