their Free Practice programme<\/a>, and preventing Antonelli from running the soft compound tyre.<\/p>\nWhen the first grid-deciding session of the weekend got under way, Mercedes found themselves in a fierce battle with the McLarens, Ferraris and Red Bull\u2019s Max Verstappen for pole position, with reigning World Champion Lando Norris coming out on top.<\/p>\n
After struggling for grip on the medium tyres through SQ1 and SQ2, championship leader Antonelli managed to salvage second on the grid with his sole SQ3 lap on the softs, while team mate Russell had to settle for sixth.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a pretty messy session,\u201d admitted Antonelli when he spoke to the media afterwards. \u201cI struggled a lot with the car. On the medium I couldn\u2019t get a good lap in, and then on the softs all of a sudden the car became more alive, I felt more comfortable.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, it was a shame not to try the soft in FP1. I think there was a little bit left on the table. But I think despite everything it was a decent result, and with the team we did a great job on recovering.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we look forward to tomorrow. Definitely we\u2019ll dig deep tonight to see what we can do better in order to be faster tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quizzed on the pace shown by McLaren and Ferrari in particular, Antonelli repeated his comments from Thursday\u2019s media sessions, but remains hopeful that Mercedes can still challenge for overall honours in Florida.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were expecting this weekend to be quite a bit tougher, also because those teams, everyone brought major upgrades, which obviously they closed the gap massively or even went in front of us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDefinitely the McLarens, they\u2019ve got the same power unit as us, and they improve a lot the car, so it was expected for them to be at the front. But I think we can be in the fight, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to try to do tomorrow and then on Sunday as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kimi Antonelli was left with a feeling of relief over his and Mercedes\u2019 recovery to second position during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-644069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644069","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=644069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}