What we learned from Friday practice at the 2026 F1 Spanish GP

When the flag drops, the speculation stops. Thursday was dedicated to first impressions as the drivers (well, most of them) arrived at the Madring circuit for the first time; at that stage, most hadn't even had time to conduct the most cursory of track walks. Instead, they relied on their opinions of the track layout - a winding, tricky layout drawing parallels to Jeddah and Macau - from their pre-weekend exploits in the simulator. Pierre Gasly reckoned he'd touched every wall on his first few laps, and Alpine was hoping that the Monza polesitter would be more circumspect around the real thing.

There is little respite for the drivers around the Madring, something that they've greatly valued so far - whether their opinions will change after 57 laps of the place on Sunday afternoon remains to be seen. Even on the exit of Turn 4, the driver is already thinking about lines through the Miami-esque pre-overpass chicane, seeking to chain together the next collection of bends, turns, and kinks on their path uphill to La Monumental... and hoping they don't encounter traffic half-way through the lap.

With a smorgasbord of corner profiles across all speed ranges, the Madring's opening practice session thus offered very little surprise as Mercedes, bearing the best all-round car, topped both Friday sessions.

George Russell concluded the first hour of running on the cusp of breaking into the 1m33s, ultimately ending FP1 with a 1m34.077s to sit 0.286s clear of his championship-leading team-mate Kimi Antonelli. The Italian struck back, however, with his 1m33.662s to lead FP2. Here, Antonelli was 0.113s clear of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc, with Russell fifth and 0.337s behind. One-all, then, between the two Mercedes drivers.

A clean FP1 suggested that the drivers were underplaying their hands, given that the Madring had already proven punishing to the F3 field during its collective test last month, and to the F2 contingent during qualifying. Perhaps the F1 drivers felt less pressured to prove themselves...or that the mistakes would happen once the wicks were turned up later in the afternoon. 

And so it came to pass, when Arvid Lindblad - who'd already struck gold with the fourth-fastest time of the session - posted his Racing Bulls machinery into the wall a Turn 13. Having lost the car quite early in the corner, Lindblad's VCARB swung around on him. Although he tried to dial in the countersteer, he couldn't stop his chariot from biffing the Tecpro barrier side on. 

Piastri had to conduct most of the running for McLaren as Norris suffered with gearbox issues

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This put a bit of a dampener on the remaining qualifying simulations, as the teams figured it was better to spend the time on the other side of the red flag gathering some race pace data. This left Antonelli, the two Ferraris, Lindblad, and Max Verstappen as the top six, followed by McLaren's Oscar Piastri - its sole representative as Lando Norris was ruled out after just two laps with a gearbox issue. The reigning champion reported his transmission slipping into "false neutrals" and, upon his lap back to the pits, was told to avoid sixth gear as his mechanics prepared another rear-end sub-assembly in advance for tomorrow. 

Qualifying will be important here. The plethora of combined brake-and-turn corners and lack of a run-up to many of the key pinch-points around the lap may make it difficult for passes to emerge - unless, of course, the tyres start to come into play...

Average FP2 stints

In terms of performance, the top three teams aren't too much of a surprise; Mercedes looked reasonably comfortable, and Verstappen's soft-tyre stint wasn't a million miles away (where possible, we took the best medium stint - but Liam Lawson hadn't been able to log one). Yuki Tsunoda's soft-tyre run for Racing Bulls split Ferrari and McLaren, which only had Piastri's medium run to lean on.

But it's not so much the averages that are important here, but rather a degradation in lap time - which was significant throughout the field, as the front-left tyre was taking a battering through the high-speed left-handers. The load through La Monumental, Turn 14 and Turn 19 was charging up the left-hand tyres with excess heat, exacerbated by the 50C-plus track temperatures, and making it very difficult to maintain a consistent front-end. 

During the early sighter runs in FP2 on mediums, the drivers needed two cool laps to bring the C3s back into range. Yet it became a slog on the longer runs as graining started to bite. Both Ferrari drivers reported that the front-left was making their lives very difficult towards the end of their longer runs, as did Gasly and Gabriel Bortoleto... but it's certain that more would concur with their assessments. 

"The grip is very high but you're sliding quite aggressively," Russell noted. "With the deg we had in FP1, a six-stop race would have been the fastest way. FP2 is slightly better, and I'm sure the race on Sunday will be better again - but that's the biggest question mark."

And what impact will that have on the race? "It's going to be very tough [to overtake] I think, but if there is the tyre degradation like we saw in FP1 that will make things easier."

Russell reckoned a six-stopper might be on the cars...if Sunday's degradation matches that from FP1

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Mercedes and Red Bull nonetheless appeared to cope with the situation best in FP2, Verstappen told by Gianpiero Lambiase that he's "done quite a good job so far with management, others seem to be suffering with the front-left". Instead, the Dutchman encountered heavy steering when the session resumed, which seemed to be an issue with power steering. This is something that hurt Tsunoda through FP1, and prolonged banked corners do tend to add loads through the power steering system to which it is not generally accustomed to facing. 

McLaren, on the other hand, seemed to struggle with both graining and outright pace. Norris' inability to do much beyond sitting in the pit garage hurt its data-gathering exercises in FP2, so the team will hope that one car's worth of experience will be enough for its simulator drivers to be going on with. 

"In the race running, it's been a nightmare to try and manage the tyres with graining," Piastri explained. "So, a lot of corners have been very difficult, but it's been an interesting day. I think we are struggling a little bit for pace, but hopefully we can find a bit more tomorrow.

"It is normally the case that it gets better through the weekend, but we'll have to wait and see how much better. So, at the moment I'm not sure. I think also for us it's worse than for some others, which is not a great thing obviously. In terms of setup, there's a few things you can do, but not a huge amount unfortunately. So, we'll see what we get."

It isn't unreasonable to expect that the teams will find a fair chunk of performance overnight, now that the simulators have real-world data to work with. A team enters a weekend with a benchmark usually determined by the running on the sim but, with incomplete track data, it left the door open to plenty more refinements.

Expect a few turnarounds come FP3 - and presumably, the (in-jest) expectation of a six-stopper to fall to a more reasonable level. It wouldn't be unexpected, however, to see teams on the cusp of a three-stop strategy on Sunday if the graining doesn't improve. 

Expect Sunday's race to present a test of tyre degradation

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