George Russell topped a first practice session for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in which Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli exited early.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Antonelli retired his smoking W17 after 25 minutes, citing an apparent hydraulics issue, at a time when he was leading the way.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The championship leader, 81 points clear in the drivers’ standings, finished fifth quickest, 0.878s behind Russell’s timesheet-topping one minute 45.387s.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
In between the two Mercedes drivers were Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and the Ferrari duo of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, the trio all four-tenths of a second behind Russell.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Check out the full results from FP1 at the 2026 F1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix below.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell topped a first practice session for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in which Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610446,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3518,3521,3519,3522,3520,3517,3515,3513,3516,3514,111,139,69,3512,213],"class_list":["post-610445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motorsport","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-racing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}