F1 Bahrain GP in Malaysia: Follow FP1 at Sepang with live timing

Gasly and Hulkenberg have now pushed the McLarens outside the to p10. Piastri and Norris are both 1.7s off Verstappen's benchmark. That's gotta hurt! Both papaya pugilists now returning to the track; Norris on scrubbed softs, Piastri on scrubbed mediums.

Fernando Alonso's fastest lap so far, meanwhile, is a 1m39.683s. That's P14 at the moment and quicker than both the Williams and Haas cars, plus Colapinto.

Mind you, Fernando took his maiden pole position here back in 2003, when he was less wrinkly.

Yesterday Lance Stroll revealed that Aston Martin were "losing two seconds" through engine performance alone.

If only it were possible to shoehorn a Mercedes engine into the AMR26 - then he'd only be 2.1s off the pace around here...

Interesting that Antonelli's best soft-tyre lap is also around a second off Verstappen's best. He's splitting the Ferraris at the moment and is in the pits. Russell has been in and put a scrubbed set of mediums so that's it for the quali sims as far as he's concerned.

Both Racing Bulls faster than the McLarens at the moment.

We're shifting into qualifying simulations at the moment as the majority of the field are now out on softs. Only Ocon, Bearman and Stroll still on track on mediums.

Leclerc and Hamilton put in fairly respectable-looking first push laps on those softs but they're now being pushed back again by Verstappen's latest benchmark. Hamilton a second off Max's flier.

Russell does a 1m37.903s on the softs; Hadjar, on the same rubber, responds with a lap 0.400s off.

Now Verstappen goes fastest of all with a 1m37.520s on softs.

On paper this isn't a brilliant track for either McLaren or Ferrari and, though it's still early in the weekend, that seems to be bearing out. The McLaren is a slightly draggier car than the Mercedes with which it shares an engine, and it has lower gear ratios. All that adds up to punishment on the straight. And there are only a few decently fast corners here.

Let's check in with Ferrari and McLaren. Leclerc and Hamilton currently P6 and P7 and about a second and a half off the absolute pace. They've just swapped to softs.

Piastri also now out on softs after early lappery on mediums. His fastest lap so far is 2.495s off Verstappen. Norris was closer but still 2s off, and is currently in the garage.

Hadjar also looking at a grid penalty for new PU components.

Word reaching us that Franco Colapinto will be taking an additional grid penalty on top of the five places for triggering that shunt in Baku.

Yes, he's taken his fifth internal combustion engine of the year. So that's a 10-place penalty plus the existing five.

Russell's fastest lap on those mediums is just 0.049s off Verstappen's benchmark. George has also pitted after two stints on the same tyres, five laps followed by three.

Antonelli has done three, three and two laps and is also back in the garage. Arvid Lindblad now third fastest, three tenths off Verstappen, with a lap set on the soft rubber. 

Verstappen and Hadjar end their soft-tyres runs after 7 and 8 laps respectively. The Mercedes continue to beat around on the medium rubber.

Let's not get too excited about laptimes just yet, though: Lewis Hamilton's pole lap in 2017 was 1m30.076s and the fastest lap of the race was 1m34.080s by Sebastian Vettel in a Ferrari. 

Verstappen improves to 1m38.883 on his second push lap on those softs. Unusual to see performance running so early in FP1 but we assume Red Bull knows what it's doing.

After a bit of turning off and turning back on again, data flow is restored. Just Colapinto yet to set a timed lap but he's now circulating again.

Well Albon has just done a timed lap; our data feed has just frozen.

Colapinto, Albon, Sainz and Hulkenberg haven't done a timed lap yet - just one lap then back into the pits.

Hadjar graphically demonstrates the low-grip status of the track at the moment with a queasy moment of understeer at the final hairpin.

On-board shots from F1 TV reminding us how much combined steering and braking/acceleration goes on at this track, which is also tough on tyres. Check out Turn 9 as well: a sharp-ish left-hander which goes slightly uphill. This is quite a big traction zone where it's very easy to spin up the rear tyres.

Antonelli pops in a 1m40.137s first time out, but soft-shod Verstappen usurps him from the top of the timesheet with a 1m39.400s. 

Mediums appear to the tyre of choice for now, the outliers being Colapinto, Lindblad, Hadjar and Verstappen on softs. Russell now out on track too.

Psst! Want to see the new Mercedes upgrade package? Of course you do.

On the positive side, we could be in for more strategic variation owing to the highly abrasive track surface which Oscar Piastri likened to "sandpaper". The chunky, open aggregate drains relatively well in wet conditions and dries quickly, but it causes the tyres to overheat and degrade rapidly.

A welcome relief after an Azerbaijan GP that was a nailed-on one-stop race on the softest tyre compound available.

Well the engines are firing up in the garages so we're not far away from the first business of the day beginning.

It'll be interesting to see how the 2026 cars perform around this track. Pre-weekend simulations indicate that the track's layout militates against using electrical deployment in the second sector because the cars need all the juice they've got over the three big straights: one at the end of the lap, the start-finish, and then again after the Turn-1-2 complex.

Sepang held its maiden grand prix in 1999. This was the year Michael Schumacher broke his leg in a crash at Silverstone and sat out the next six races while Mika Salo filled in for him. Team-mate Eddie Irvine became an unlikely championship challenger to McLaren's Mika Hakkinen...

Malaysia was the penultimate round and Michael was pressed into service again as number two to Irvine. Urban legend has it that Michael had very little interest in doing this so he kept telling Ferrari his leg hasn't healed yet... until Luca di Montezemolo telephoned his house, Michael's daughter answered it, and said "Daddy's out playing football". Whoops!

In the race, Irvine led a Ferrari 1-2 but the cars were then disqualified when their bargeboards were found to be illegal. Mika Hakkinen was the champion!

Then the results were reinstated on appeal, via the argument that if you measured the bargeboards from a certain angle they were legal. Mika Hakkinen wasn't the champion! Until Suzuka anyway.

Photo by: Getty Images

Sepang, of course, was the first waypoint of Formula 1's massive global expansion via government-backed GPs with flashy new tracks and statement architecture.

Photo by: Getty Images

Something you didn't see much of in the past here at Sepang was the fans – because tickets were ridiculously expensive and very few people in the locality had any interest in F1. That, of course, has changed post-Drive To Survive...

Fan waves Malaysian flag

Photo by: Colin McMaster / LAT Images via Getty Images

Let's get you caught up with matters of moment from the past couple of days.

GOOD MORNING SEPANG

And a very warm welcome to those of you in westward timezones who can still taste the toothpaste. F1 returns to Malaysia this weekend for the first time since 2017, as the Sepang circuit hosts the Bahrain Grand Prix.

We could be in for our first properly wet track sessions of the weekend given the tropical climate - it has a predisposition to downpours at bout 4 o'clock in the afternoon, a fact which seems to have been lost on those who scheduled a 3pm race start.

And let's all join hands and hope our man Ronald Vording can stay awake today after his late finish and two-hour door-to-door journey from media centre to hotel. #PrayForRonald