{"id":22965,"date":"2025-07-25T11:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T11:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/22965\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T11:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T11:48:10","slug":"oscar-piastri-tops-only-spa-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/22965\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Piastri tops only Spa practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

McLaren’s championship leader Oscar Piastri<\/a> has set the fastest time in Friday’s sole free practice session for Formula 1’s Belgian Grand Prix.<\/p>\n

Piastri set his fastest lap of 1m42.022s in the closing stages of a one-hour session dominated by set-up work dialling in car upgrades rather than fast times.<\/p>\n

No less than eight out of 10 teams brought some sort of aerodynamic developments to the Belgian Ardennes, with a mixture of track-specific low-downforce wings and general upgrades as the in-season development race edges towards the finish line.<\/p>\n

It meant the first 40 minutes featured limited one-lap action, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc<\/a> leading the way on Pirelli’s hardest C1 compound.<\/p>\n

Most notably there were offs for Andrea Kimi Antonelli<\/a> and Franco Colapinto<\/a> in La Source, while Lewis Hamilton<\/a> went wide through Les Combes, before drawing the ire of Gabriel Bortoleto<\/a> for an impeding incident through Eau Rouge.<\/p>\n

The tempo was finally upped inside the final 15 minutes when drivers tried on the soft C4 compound, with Lance Stroll<\/a> briefly taking top spot.<\/p>\n

Sporting a new low-downforce rear wing on the McLaren<\/a> MCL39, Piastri went another second quicker than the Aston Martin driver to establish a 1m42.123s lap, which nobody got near to. Piastri then shaved off another tenth in the final minutes to set a 1m42.022s.<\/p>\n

\"Max <\/p>\n

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing<\/p>\n

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool<\/p>\n

Under the watchful eye of new Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies, world champion Max Verstappen<\/a> was second after conducting back-to-back tests of Red Bull’s new and previous front wings, reporting that his new set-up still felt “weird” with mid-corner understeer. His time of 1m42.426s was four tenths slower than Piastri’s benchmark.<\/p>\n

Team-mate Lando Norris<\/a> initially had to abandon his corresponding qualifying sim after dipping his left-hand side on the gravel, but then went second with his next effort before being demoted by Verstappen, albeit half a second adrift of Piastri.<\/p>\n

George Russell<\/a> was dropped to fourth aboard the Mercedes<\/a>, followed by long-time session leader Leclerc, with the pair shadowed by their respective team-mates Antonelli and Hamilton.<\/p>\n

Stroll and Fernando Alonso<\/a>, who sampled Aston Martin’s new front wing assembly, finished in eighth and ninth, with Racing Bulls<\/a> rookie Isack Hadjar<\/a> rounding out the top 10 ahead of Williams’ Carlos Sainz<\/a>, who had to sit out the early running due to a fuel system issue on his Williams<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Qualifying for Saturday’s sprint race follows at 16:30 local Belgian time.<\/p>\n

FP1 result:<\/p>\n

In this article<\/p>\n

Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n

Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McLaren’s championship leader Oscar Piastri has set the fastest time in Friday’s sole free practice session for Formula…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[3272,49,48,578,15863,576,577,590,592,82],"class_list":["post-22965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-belgian-gp","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-f1-belgian-grand-prix-2025","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-mclaren","tag-oscar-piastri","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}