The first European race of the season is typically when most teams begin bringing their most significant upgrade packages, but it seems it’ll take more than a round of new parts to slow McLaren.
Oscar Piastri was in total control on Friday, beating teammate Lando Norris in both practice sessions and putting a very healthy lead over the rest of the field.
With qualifying key around narrow Imola, it stands McLaren in good stead to continue its glittering victory run — so long as it can fix one key problem that’s held it back all year.
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Meanwhile, off the track, Alpine’s chaotic fortnight continues with yet another twist coming out of its management ranks.
McLAREN CONTROLS THE PACE
Oscar Piastri cemented McLaren’s status as the team to beat in Imola by topping both Friday practice sessions, in both cases ahead of teammate Lando Norris.
The margin between the two was extremely tight all day and settled at just 0.025 seconds.
While they were a relatively restrained 0.276 seconds ahead of the next best car — Pierre Gasly’s Alpine, whose speed requires some further explanation, as elaborated below — more representative is the 0.4-second gap back to George Russell in fourth.
And both McLaren drivers could have — should have — been faster.
Piastri’s fastest lap comprised two purple sectors to open, but he lost time in the final split to a gaggle of cars through the two Rivazza corners. He’d been 0.267 seconds up on the field up to that point but lost almost 0.25 seconds threading the needle.
Norris, meanwhile, looked set to go fractionally faster with his second lap on the soft tyre — this, remember being the new super-soft C6 — until a mistake at those final turns forced him to abandon the lap.
Certainly the two are close, and on the evidence of practice, the gap is even larger than it appears.
Piastri, though, isn’t willing to buy the hype just yet.
“I think there are still some things we want to try and work on and improve,” he said. “This wouldn’t be the first Friday we’ve looked strong and then everyone’s found a bit more going into qualifying.
“At the moment I don’t think it’s just Lando and me. There are a few others that will join us in the fight tomorrow, so we’ve got to keep our heads down and try to find a bit more.
“The car’s feeling decent. Still a few more things to tweak, but all and all not bad.”
And it’s fair enough to be cautious, though not just because other teams could make gains — and McLaren has often been susceptible to having its Friday advantage slashed because the car is so good straight out of the box.
McLaren has fumbled what should have been a pole-getting advantage three times from six grands prix this year, and Imola is the sort of circuit that will severely punish even small mistakes.
And that could be extremely costly here, where overtaking is extremely difficult, even with a car advantage.
That McLaren is fastest isn’t a surprise. What we don’t know is whether it’ll be able to use that pace to take pole.
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IS ALPINE REALLY THE NEXT-BEST TEAM?
A glance at the time sheet suggests that Alpine, ninth in the championship, will be McLaren’s closest contender, a powerful riposte after two weeks of off-track turmoil, having lost its team principal and having dropped rookie Jack Doohan.
Gasly was an impressive third and just 0.276 seconds slower than Piastri, but telemetry suggests Alpine had its power unit turned up to 11.
Both Gasly and teammate Franco Colapinto locked out the top two places at the speed trap — they were around 4 kilometres per hour quicker than the McLaren cars — despite the Renault engine being the most underpowered on the grid, making this a highly suspect result.
It’s perhaps not surprising the team would try to inject some positivity into its new cycle after its tumultuous fortnight since Miami — more about which is below.
That said, Gasly reported that the car felt good from the first lap and that “the potential is certainly there”. His fastest lap was clean, and at a circuit that is just as demanding on the car as it is on a driver’s confidence pushing the limit, the team is targeting Williams for the final spots in Q3.
Williams turned in less of a headline-grabbing time, but the team was comfortable with Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz in ninth and 10th, with its race pace looking impressive, certainly more so than Alpine’s long-run simulation.
But given the importance of qualifying at this narrow track, that could still see the advantage go Alpine’s way, with defending far easier than attacking in Imola.
That would be genuine good news for the embattled Enstone team.
Estimated race simulation pace, FP2
1. McLaren: fastest
2. Mercedes: +0.08 seconds
3. Red Bull Racing: +0.13 seconds
4. Ferrari: +0.34 seconds
5. Williams: +0.37 seconds
6. Racing Bulls: +0.60 seconds
7. Haas: +0.74 seconds
8. Alpine: +0.82 seconds
9. Sauber: +0.87 seconds
10. Aston Martin: +0.93 seconds
Oscar Piastri wins prestigious award | 01:05
THE CHASING FRONTRUNNERS ARE CLOSE, BUT NOT TO McLAREN
There’s no reason to think the traditional frontrunning group won’t re-emerge for qualifying and the race, with Mercedes, Red Bull Racing and Ferrari all pursuing McLaren at the head of the field.
Russell led that group in FP2, but the Mercedes driver was 0.4 seconds off the pace — and that gap probably should’ve been wider given the little time losses by both McLaren drivers.
The pack he leads is very closely matched.
Max Verstappen followed just 0.042 seconds further back, while Charles Leclerc was only 0.075 seconds slower, putting the three teams within less than 0.1 seconds of each other on single-lap pace.
But it’s more of a mixed bag of performance than the time sheet makes it look.
George Russell believes track evolution, which will reduce tyre degradation, could bring Mercedes closer to McLaren in qualifying but that in race trim his car is too far back to contend for victory, particularly as the weather is set to heat up deeper into the weekend.
There’s uncertainty about how much more time is on the table for Red Bull Racing after the team brought upgrades to Imola.
Motorsport adviser Helmut Marko suggested on Friday night that they’d worked to dial some understeer out of the car, under-rotation being a key Verstappen complaint, but the new parts didn’t appear to be enough to make much of an impact on the car’s through-corner balance problems, leaving Verstappen pessimistic about his chances.
“We tried a lot of things; some worked better than others,” Verstappen said. “Overall not fast enough at the moment.
“At the moment [confidence is] not very high. We definitely need a little bit more work to get a better through-corner balance to go faster. I think it’s the same in the long runs.
“Even then compared to other teams around us it was a bit tough today.”
But Red Bull Racing has a long-establish habit of making big gains on Friday night, meaning it’s impossible to discount the team and particularly Verstappen — who’s taken half the poles this season — from threatening in qualifying.
Ferrari also brought upgrades to its first home race of the year, but Charles Leclerc didn’t think they did much to reverse Ferrari’s slow qualifying speed. He said, again, the team looked competitive in race trim — though that’s disputable given the above numbers — but its lack of one-lap performance would count it out for pole and therefore victory.
Lewis Hamilton, though, was somewhat more optimistic, He’d been just 0.096 seconds slower than Piastri in FP1 but was shocked to find that pace disappear in FP2, when he dropped to 11th and 0.65 seconds off the pace.
He put it down to one problem: braking, having complained multiple times in FP2 of being unable to stop the car effectively.
Brakes have been a key part of his Ferrari transition, the Italian team using a different braking material to Mercedes, but the Briton said the problem on Friday was more fundamental than that.
“It’s not the transition, it’s the performance [of the material],” he said. “It’s a lottery. We roll the dice — you put one [pad] on and it works, and you put another on and it doesn’t.
“That’s been quite a big issue all year. I’ve never experienced that before.
“I hope tomorrow we’ll figure something out. We’re working on it for sure.”
‘We’re taking a beating in the media’ | 01:05
BRIATORE MAKES ‘FOREVER’ CLAIM IN ALPINE TWIST
Executive director and de facto Alpine principal Flavio Briatore has backtracked on his earlier position that Franco Colapinto’s place at the team would be reassessed after five grands prix, declaring in Imola that there’s “no set limit” for the Argentine.
The team dropped Jack Doohan from the seat last week, just six rounds into the season, to promote reserve driver Colapinto into its full-time line-up.
The team’s press release explicitly stated that the switch would last “for the next five rounds”, declaring there would be “a new evaluation before the British Grand Prix in July”. It described the situation as an “ongoing assessment of its driver line-up”.
Briatore himself was quoted in the press release confirming as much.
“We have come to the decision to put Franco in the car alongside Pierre [Gasly] for the next five races,” he said. “The next five races will give us an opportunity to try something different, and after this time period we will assess our options.”
But the Italian boss appeared to deny that was ever his or the team’s position in comments to Sky Sport Italy ahead of this weekend’s race.
“Franco will race as much as needed,” he said. “I read somewhere that he’ll have five races, but no, there’s no set limit on his races.
“He needs to be fast, not crash, and score points. I’m only asking him these three things — not 10. If he does them well, he’ll drive forever.”
Despite several drivers arguing that Doohan had shown enough in six races to be retained and that Alpine had dealt with the Aussie extremely harshly, Briatore contended that the former Alpine junior had underwhelmed on debut.
“I have to say, I also expected more from Jack Doohan — maybe he needs a break,” he said.
Briatore’s remarkable nine-day backflip does nothing to reverse the impression of a team in chaos after a rough fortnight between rounds.
Meanwhile, former team principal Oliver Oakes has resurfaced since resigning his post in the days after the previous race, appearing in the Formula 2 paddock.
Oakes’s Hitech team is competing in Formula 2 and Formula 3 this weekend, and the 37-year-old remains a director of the company.
Oakes resigned from Alpine just days after his brother and Hitech co-director, William Oakes, was arrested for transferring criminal property.
Michael Sanwell-Lewis, Hitech’s financial controller, was subsequently named as an additional director. All three men are still listed as active heads of the company.