F1 Belgian GP: Carlos Sainz fastest from McLaren pair as Logan Sargeant crashes in wet practice session
The only hour of practice before qualifying at Spa-Fran♚corchamps was affected by heavy, consistent rain as Sainz emerged from the gloom to put his Ferrari at the top of the timesheets.
Running on intermediate tyres, Sainz was 0.585s faster than Oscar Piastri, wi🌌th McLaren teammate Lando Norris ending up 1.277s off the pace in third.
Times were not particularly representative as the drivers mainly elected to get an initial feel for the tricky ⛦track conditions on both the intermediate and full wet compounds.
Charles Lec🎃lerc was fourth-fastest in the other Ferrari, nearly five seconds adrift of his pace-setting teamma💧te.
Red Bull’s Sergio Perez was fifth, ahe♔ad of Alex Albon’s Williams, AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda and the Haas of Kevin Magnussen.
Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg completed the top-10 order for AlphaTauri and Haas 𓄧respectively.
The session was briefly red-flagged af🦋ter Logan Sargeant collided with the barriers at the of the Kemmel Straight.
Fernando Alonso, the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, and the Alfa Romeo duo of Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu,🍨 were the only other d🐭rivers to set lap times.
Reigning world champion Max Verstappen, who will be hit with༒ a five-place grid penalty after ex✨ceeding his gearbox allocation, completed just a single installation lap as he propped up the FP1 order.
Qualifying for Sunday’s main grand prix is sche🐻duled to take place at 5pm local time (4pm UK).&nbs🐓p;
The FIA has already confirmed that the current championship order, rather than the results of practice, will be used to set the grid ꦯif qualifying cannot go ahead.
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