Luke’s Weekend Take – Mexico GP 2024

Looking now into the action, we immediately see a Red Flag come out 5 minutes into the session as there was a piece of debris on the pit straight which we later find out it came off Max Verstappen’s car as while it was under Red Flag conditions we see the mechanics from Red Bull trying to glue some stuff to the floor. The session quickly cleared back to green after one of the Marshalls ran on track to pick up the Carbon Fibre off the track and everyone got going again with their programs.

We were promptly interrupted again with 37 minutes left on the clock as we get another Red Flag, this time a bit more serious as we cut to a shot of Alex Albon in the barriers near Turn 10 with Bearman stopped on track at the same section of the track with a damaged car insinuating that the 2 touched. After a replay we see Albon on a push lap while Bearman was on a slow lap and coming into Turn 10 we see Albon lifting off a bit as he thought that Bearman was going to be in the way, as soon as he lifted off, the car snapped and Albon lost downforce and the rear snapped away, Albon tried to correct the slide but he wasn’t able to avoid contact with Bearman and his rear tyre hit the front tyre for Bearman and this sent Albon into a spin into the barriers. This was quite a hard hit for Albon and his Williams was in a pretty bad shape as all corners seem to be damaged which means that Williams mechanics are going to be working flat out trying to get that car ready for FP2. The stewards had noted this incident down and investigated this after the session but announced ahead of FP2 that no further investigation was needed.

Session resumed with 24 minutes left on the clock and nearly everyone was out on the softs to start getting some data on these tyres. Oscar Piastri at McLaren doesn’t seem to be having the best time so far with the setup of the car with 14 minutes left as the team were asking him if he wants to go for it again or keep doing continuous laps, at this stage he was nearly a full second off the leader sitting in 6^th. Verstappen with 7 minutes left we hear Verstappen reporting no power in his engine as he is seen coming into the pits so the team can look into the car, and we don’t see Verstappen out again in FP1. At the end of the session we see George Russell topping the leaderboard followed by Carlos Sainz and Yuki Tsunoda.

As already mentioned for FP2 we will have all teams running next year Pirelli tyres and all teams will have different tyres from one another and they will be mandated to all have a performance run and a long run each so that Pirelli can gather the data to see how the degradation will work along with the performance of the tyres.

Williams are still working on Albon’s car at the start of FP2 and 13 mins into the session we hear James Vowles on the radio talking to the commentators saying that he is not confident that the car will be ready and Albon will most likely be missing out on FP2 as well as they had to change the engine and all 4 corners on the car. Someone else who was still having issues was Max Verstappen as 10 minutes in we hear him say that he is still having engine issues as he is saying he is hearing a weird noise coming from the engine. This was the same engine from FP1 as the team opted not to change engine and the team asks Max to pit.

13 minutes in we see another Red Flag as we cut into a shot of George Russell in the barriers at Turn 9 and this was another big impact we had so far. After a replay we see Russell on a push lap and took too much kerb at Turn 8 for a bit too long and lost traction and span right into the barriers with some speed. Luckily Russell was able to get out of the car on his own however he was quite winded from the crash as there was an electrical pole that was also bent with the crash even though there was tech pro barriers there. The session took 22 minutes to go back green due to all the repairs that needed to be done.

After the session went green once more, we hear Verstappen’s engineer come on the radio asking Max to put the car in Pit Recharge as they were seeing some issues again with the engine and Max is seen getting back to the pits as the team asked him to come in. Max comes out of the car which meant that he was not going to be back out in this session while the team look into the issue.

With an hour nearly over we hear Esteban Ocon come on the radio saying he Is smelling something burning and it’s not from his car, he says it is smelling something like burning brakes. Ocon was right as Guanyu comes on the radio saying his brakes were on fire in Sector 2 while later he also came on saying his engine was cutting out. At the end of the session we see Carlos Sainz on top of the leaderboard followed by Oscar Piastri and Yuki Tsunoda. Worth nothing that all these times were done on the test tyres for next year as only 3 drivers managed to get on the mediums towards the end of the session after they finished the mandatory testing for Pirelli. Williams weren’t able to get Albon’s car ready so didn’t get any running while Max Verstappen never came back out due to the engine issues.