Mercedes moved back ahead as Friday pacesetter McLaren had a muted start to qualifying day at Formula 1’s Japanese Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
Kimi Antonelli beat George Russell by 0.254 seconds in final practice in a Mercedes 1-2 at the front, with everyone else close to a second back.<\/p>\n
McLaren had been fastest with Oscar Piastri on Friday but he was 1.002s off the pace in fourth behind Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari.<\/p>\n
The second McLaren of world champion Lando Norris missed the first half of the session with an ERS problem that the team feared would rule him out of the whole hour at first. He worked his way up to sixth, with Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari just ahead.<\/p>\n
It was a very encouraging session for Audi, which was as high as fifth going into the final minutes and ended up seventh and ninth with Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto sandwiching an unhappy Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.<\/p>\n
Alpine’s Pierre Gasly pushed the other Red Bull of Isack Hadjar out of the top 10 late on.<\/p>\n
At the back, Aston Martin was a second off even Cadillac’s pace on Honda’s home ground.<\/p>\n
Ollie Bearman produced the session’s only noteworthy incident, with a fast but beautifully caught spin out of Spoon.<\/p>\n
Results<\/p>\n
1 Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes) 1m29.362s
2 George Russell (Mercedes) +0.254s
3 Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) +0.867s
4 Oscar Piastri (McLaren) +1.002s
5 Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) +1.021s
6 Lando Norris (McLaren) +1.238s
7 Nico Hulkenberg (Audi) +1.296s
8 Max Verstappen (Red Bull) +1.548s
9 Gabriel Bortoleto (Audi) +1.638s
10 Pierre Gasly (Alpine) +1.720s
11 Isack Hadjar (Red Bull) +1.732s
12 Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls) +1.735s
13 Arvid Lindblad (Racing Bulls) +1.926s
14 Esteban Ocon (Haas) +1.964s
15 Ollie Bearman (Haas) +2.196s
16 Alex Albon (Williams) +2.371s
17 Franco Colapinto (Alpine) +2.397s
18 Carlos Sainz (Williams) +2.467s
19 Valtteri Bottas (Cadillac) +3.141s
20 Sergio Perez (Cadillac) +3.178s
21 Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) +4.123s
22 Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) +4.167s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes moved back ahead as Friday pacesetter McLaren had a muted start to qualifying day at Formula 1’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-569206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}