- Max Verstappen was back on top for the third session in a row as free practice finished in cool, cloudy conditions at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodriguez on Saturday morning – but the rest of the F1 pecking order changed.
The 21-year-old Dutchman’s Red Bull Renault topped the one-hour session with a best lap of 1 minute 16.284 seconds, allowing his team and fans to breathe a sigh of relief that his car’s failure on Friday afternoon, diagnosed as a hydraulic problem, had no major consequences.
But the overnight change in the weather ended Renault’s virtual monopoly of the top times throughout Friday’s two sessions and brought the big guns of Mercedes and Ferrari firmly back into play.
A frantic end to Saturday morning’s action brought Lewis Hamilton’s Silver Arrow back within a quarter of a second of Verstappen in second place, while Sebastian Vettel’s Prancing Horse was only another 0.028s away in third.
The bad news for Mercedes was that Valtteri Bottas had to park his #77 car at the exit from the Foro Sol with 15 minutes of the session remaining.
‘Too early to say,’ said the disgruntled Finn when asked what the problem was as he walked back to his garage, ‘the engine stopped and I got this warning.’ His dashboard told the tale, pointing the finger at the car’s hydraulic system.
Daniel Ricciardo had also started the session with a word of warning when asked if Red Bull could repeat Friday’s sizeable advantage: ‘If we get that difference today it’ll be an even greater pleasure,’ the Australian said – but finishing in fourth place, three-quarters of a second off his teammate’s, suggested he was wise to be concerned.
With Kimi Räikkönen fifth, the man who will replace him at Ferrari next year caught the eye when the action hotted up. Charles Leclerc, tipped to be F1’s next mega-star, posted the first true flying lap with a 1:17.059 and finished the session with the Ferrari-powered Sauber in an unlikely sixth position.
Mexico’s main man Sergio Pérez had another straightforward but unexceptional hour on track, finishing in 12th spot behind Racing Point teammate Esteban Ocon.
The practice began with the track temperature around 30 degrees cooler than Friday and the track still damp from Friday night’s heavy rain. That opened the door, briefly, for the lesser teams to shine.
So much so that when Fernando Alonso put his McLaren on top once he had switched from intermediate to Hypersoft tyres, his engineer radioed: ‘I know you don’t hear this very often, but we are P1, purple in every sector.’ Of course it didn’t last…
Another casualty of the morning session was Kevin Magnussen, whose Haas was firmly stuck in the garage while his team set about an intercooler change on its Ferrari engine.
And even Verstappen ended his apparently successful hour with another word of caution. His #33 Red Bull was not charging its battery fully, but team principal Christian Horner had summed things up nicely when he said such niggles were just signs of his drivers being ‘in the pursuit of excellence all the time.’
And now it’s the rest of the field in pursuit of Verstappen as he guns for his first-ever F1 pole position.
