F1 Belgian GP: Oscar Piastri tops only Spa practice

McLaren’s championship leader Oscar Piastri has set the fastest time in Friday’s sole free practice session for Formula 1’s Belgian Grand Prix.

Piastri set his quickest lap of 1m42.022s in the closing stages of a one-hour session dominated by set-up work dialling in car upgrades rather than fast times.

No fewer than eight out of 10 teams brought some sort of aerodynamic developments to the Belgian Ardennes, with a mixture of track-specific low-downforce wings and general upgrades as the in-season development race edges towards the finish line.

It meant the first 40 minutes featured limited one-lap action, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc leading the way on Pirelli’s hardest C1 compound.

Most notably there were offs for Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Franco Colapinto at La Source, while Lewis Hamilton went wide through Les Combes, before drawing the ire of Gabriel Bortoleto for an impeding incident through Eau Rouge.

The tempo was finally upped inside the final 15 minutes when drivers tried on the soft C4 compound, with Lance Stroll briefly taking top spot.

Sporting a new low-downforce rear wing on the McLaren MCL39, Piastri went another second quicker than the Aston Martin driver to establish a 1m42.123s lap, which nobody got near to. Piastri then shaved off another tenth in the final minutes to set a 1m42.022s.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Under the watchful eye of new Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies, world champion Max Verstappen was second after conducting back-to-back tests of Red Bull’s new and previous front wings, reporting that his new set-up still felt “weird” with mid-corner understeer. His time of 1m42.426s was four tenths slower than Piastri’s benchmark.

Team-mate Lando Norris initially had to abandon his corresponding qualifying sim after dipping his left-hand side on the gravel, but then went second with his next effort before being demoted by Verstappen, albeit half a second adrift of Piastri.

George Russell was dropped to fourth aboard the Mercedes, followed by long-time session leader Leclerc, with the pair shadowed by their respective team-mates Antonelli and Hamilton.

Stroll and Fernando Alonso, who sampled Aston Martin’s new front wing assembly, finished in eighth and ninth, with Racing Bulls rookie Isack Hadjar rounding out the top 10 ahead of Williams’ Carlos Sainz, who had to sit out the early running due to a fuel system issue on his Williams.

Qualifying for Saturday’s sprint race follows at 16:30 local Belgian time.