Bojan Vrbnjak
The first free practice started in light rain. But right at the beginning, the first controversial situation. After the Mercedes team told its racer Valtteri Bootas late to turn into the pits, he turned onto the pits on the wrong side. Recall that his teammate in Hockenheim received a penalty for doing so. Nevertheless, the Commissioners have noticed this, and now the question arises as to what will arise from this contentious situation. All indications are that a problem has been discovered at Mercedes on his race car. After half an hour it was known that the problem was serious and Mercedes had to replace the engine, but here they used the one already used so there will be no penalty. After a good hour of training, a message came from the Mercedes camp that Bottas would no longer drive on the track.
Fastest training Hamilton set his best time in the first third of training. The current champion was also the most active racer of the first practice as he drove 41 laps. He drove the fastest in 1: 17.233 minutes and was one and a half tenths of a second faster than Max Verstappn in Red Bullu. He was third with only a thousandth of a second behind the young Dutchman Sebastian Vettel in Ferrari. Fourth was Verstappn teammate Pierre Gasly, who was a good four tenths of a second behind, and fifth was Kevin Magnussen of Haas, who was 0,7 seconds slower than Hamilton. Sixth Leclerc was already almost a second behind (0,95), and the first, who was more than a second behind, is in seventh place Renault racer Nico Hülkenberg. Eighth and ninth place were occupied by both McLaren racers, with the faster young Lando Norris, who overtook his colleague Carlos Sainz by just under two tenths of a second. The last place in the top ten went to the Finnish routine from the Alfa Romeo team, Kimi Raikkonen, who was a second and a half behind Hamilton.
Otherwise, the training went without too many surprises. Under changing conditions, we saw quite a few spins and trips off the track, but no material damage. At Sainz, they also noticed an engine failure towards the end of the training and therefore they will have to use the engine that was intended for the race in the second training.
The second free practice is scheduled for the afternoon, more precisely at 15 p.m.
