What we learned from Friday practice at the 2026 Barcelona Grand Prix

If there's a word to gauge the Formula 1 paddock's sentiment this weekend, it's "normal": a "normal" circuit, a "normal" weekend, a common, garden baseline for the 11 teams to truly gauge where they sit in F1's current pecking order. Reams upon reams of data exist on this place, from the mental to the experimental; every driver has turned thousands of laps of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, and all but one team threw together at least some degree of running here during the pre-season "shakedown" prelude to 2026.

And, after the flyaway waltz from Oceania, to Asia, to North America, to Monaco... Barcelona does feel incredibly mundane by comparison.

It's a great place to put a car through its paces, although perhaps less so when attempting to make the definition of "great racing" appear slightly less nebulous. The range of high-to-medium speed corners tends to cover quite a chunk of a car's operating envelope, although the bypass of the final-sector chicane has consigned the ersatz-Monaco test area to history. It's probably safe to assume that the slow-motion video of the cars languidly clunking over the gratuitously high kerbs is not particularly missed.

McLaren might agree with this sentiment too, given that it struggled with front locking around Monaco's combined braking-turning events. The Woking squad endured what could be charitably described as a "slightly tough time" in recent rounds with an array of reliability issues, gambles on intermediate tyres, and last week's difficulties at Monaco as neither Oscar Piastri nor Lando Norris could put its fellow top-four teams under any scrutiny in qualifying.

It looks much better in Barcelona. Norris shrugged off the impact of missing FP1 - as reserve driver Leonardo Fornaroli impressed in his stead - and duly plonked the #1 car at the top of the timing boards, just a shred quicker than George Russell. To hammer home the point that McLaren might be in ruder health this weekend, Piastri was just 0.06s off Norris, which in turn put him more than 0.3s clear of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc.

Norris was reasonably happy with McLaren's improved pace at Barcelona

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McLaren had put together a minor update for Barcelona, adding a new endplate to the new-for-Montreal front wing - one that was left on the sidelines at the previous two events as the team struggled to get the performance to reflect the experimental data seen in the wind tunnel. It won't be clear yet if the revised version of its new wing has delivered; that's something that the team will pick through overnight, but positive data will ensure that the team has a lot more latitude in balancing the car. 

When following Norris' on-board lap, it was abundantly clear that the Briton was operating on a knife-edge. There were moments where he was sliding the car around, particularly towards the end of the lap when it became clear the grip from the soft tyres was beginning to deplete, but he nonetheless looked in control of the waywardness. This certainly wasn't the way to drive the previous generation of car, but it seems to be an approach to which the new cars respond well.

"I think we're up there with the people we want to be with," Norris reckoned post-session. "It's hard to know what fuel loads and power modes the other people are on. But I think we're just happy that we're heading in the right direction from the last couple weeks. It's clear the car's working better. 

"It's probably not working as well as we want still, and there's still things I'm not happy with. And we need to improve and I want to improve. But I think we can't complain too much considering how the last month has been."

If the two McLaren drivers were close, then it was a different story at Mercedes; Kimi Antonelli was almost six-tenths down on Russell's effort, and spent the session looking relatively out of sorts. A long brake pedal hurt his preparations for Saturday, hardly a welcome development as he seeks to maintain his championship-leading momentum into the more... well, "normal" rounds.

His race runs were a bit all over the shop in comparison to those of Russell; the Italian seemed to run out of soft tyre just a few laps into his stint, while Russell did not experience anything like the swings in lap-time. Helpfully, Antonelli has this evening to delve into the less gratifying elements of practice and pull together some fixes for the morning, but he's got a bit of ground to make up on his team-mate.

It's evident that the soft tyres do overheat quite quickly, and the trick will be to get them to last through the final two corners given the high lateral loads that they experience in the brace of high-speed left-handers.

Russell has a point to prove this weekend as he hopes to get back on terms with team-mate Antonelli

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On pure pace, Ferrari is a touch behind, while Red Bull reckons that Barcelona has presented a "reality check" given its solid form of late. The RB22 had been tough to handle in higher-speed corners earlier in the year, and the drivers are finding that again in Barcelona despite the inclusion of updates.

For now, practice pace suggests that McLaren and Mercedes are in the frame to battle it out for pole - but the race runs make for very interesting reading: not just in terms of pace order, but for the race as a whole.

Average FP2 long run pace

Note: Aston Martin did not do a representative long-run stint

On the face of it, it looks as though McLaren can't quite hold over its pace from the one-lap stints, Norris being shaded by Red Bull's Max Verstappen on the equivalent soft tyre run by around two tenths per lap. Mercedes and Ferrari sit above them on the mediums but, as much as we'd love to delve into this, there's a bigger mitigating factor here that comes as a function of stint length - and since the Big Four stuck to 10-lap stints, the falling tyre performance wasn't really seen at its worst. Ferrari might be buoyed by its proximity to Mercedes, but we don't know how both teams will cope when they reach the critical zones of tyre life.

Indeed, one of the defining traits across the longer runs was degradation: the deeper a driver went into a race-equivalent simulation, the more it became clear that the tyres weren't going to hold on. When we look at this season's tyre performance overall, this is surprising; in qualifying, the tyres have been good for more than one lap, and the rate of drop-off has been quite low on this year's compounds. 

But the high-energy nature and the 50C track temperatures of Barcelona have demonstrated a very clear effect on the tyres, and the race runs generally trend towards a reasonable set of opening laps with some degradation per lap, and then a non-linear degradation path as they drop off exponentially with each passing lap. Pirelli opted to go a step softer for this year, which has surely compounded the issue.

Race stints showed significant drop-off, particularly beyond the 10-lap mark on mediums

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As an example, let's take Arvid Lindblad's 16-lap stint on the mediums, starting out in the 1m22s, and concluding in the 1m28s and 1m29s. This drop-off is quite astounding, although it is not necessarily clear if Racing Bulls was taking any steps in order to manage the stint - or if it just wanted to push the tyre to see what it did at the end of the stint. 

Oliver Bearman did an 11-lap stint on the mediums that appeared to be far more consistent; the Briton stayed within the 1m23s and looked as though he was in full massage mode to get the tyres through the run. But one estimates there's a potential breaking point beyond the 14-lap mark, if not sooner, as Pierre Gasly's equivalent run on the mediums strayed from the 1m22s-1m23s and suddenly began to deliver only 1m25s at this point.

Verstappen tried the hard tyre for a spell, but asked his garage if he could trade them in for some softs having found them difficult to work with. The hards should, if the teams can get it to bite, provide more stable lap-times for longer and will be popular on race day given that most will carry two sets into Sunday's race. Pirelli's chief engineer Simone Berra stated that "the few who did run it reported greater sliding compared to the two softer compounds, resulting in surface overheating that brings it closer, in terms of degradation, to the medium and soft."

Pirelli is nonetheless expecting a two-stop race at the least - and potentially might open the door for others to explore three-stop strategies. It ultimately depends on how well the teams can work with the set-ups overnight to keep the mediums in check for longer than 14-15 laps, and if they can mitigate the rear-end sliding that the hard tyre seems to revel in.

It's funny; most have spent the year complaining about energy levels and battery management - now, we're back to good old tyre complaints. If the two-stop-three-stop predictions turn out to be true, Sunday will be all about strategy, stints, and being decisive on track to avoid being stuck in dirty air.

Verstappen couldn't get to grips with the hard tyre during FP2

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