After the first two practice sessions at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit, two teams have already lapped quicker than they did in the whole of last weekend.
At the other end of the scale, Aston Martin had the most concerning start to practice, with a much bigger deficit to their 2024 pace than any team.
Teams’ 2024 performance in context
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Last year’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix was the second round of the season and Red Bull still enjoyed a healthy lead over the competition.
Aston Martin was the third-fastest team. Fernando Alonso produced their best result of the season, qualifying on the second row of the grid and finishing fifth.
Teams’ progress vs 2024
Alonso is yet to score a point so far this year and Aston Martin will have to find a lot of pace from their car overnight if that is going to change this weekend. They weren’t the slowest team on Friday – that was Haas – but their year-on-year change in performance is the least encouraging.
On paper, all teams should expect to improve their times this year, not just due to the benefit of 12 months’ development on their cars, but because Pirelli has brought tyres which are one stage softer than those used last year. However they proved tricky to extract the best from over a single lap, and Alonso encountered a lot of traffic on his run, which goes some way towards explaining Aston Martin’s struggles.
After Pierre Gasly headed the first practice session for Alpine, the team showed the best year-on-year swing of any team by the end of Friday. However they were slowest by over three tenths of a second at this race last year.
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Teams’ 2024 and 2025 times
Red Bull has tended to lap further off its potential pace on Friday than Saturday compared to its rivals. Yuki Tsunoda was far closer to Max Verstappen’s single-lap pace today than he managed in Jeddah, and Verstappen set his quickest lap time earlier in Friday practice than several of his key rivals. Having ended Saturday as second-fastest team, they look in far better shape than they did in Bahrain.
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First and second practice times
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