Quick start, but the power unit is acting up
The Friday in Miami for the F1 World Championship leader, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, opened with a bittersweet free practice session. The very young Italian Mercedes driver immediately seemed at ease on the Florida track where 12 months ago he had obtained his first pole position in the Sprint qualifying; after the first part of the session, in fact, when all the top drivers had used hard tires, Antonelli was second in the timing standings behind only Charles Leclerc.
However, the winner of the Chinese and Japanese GPs was not able to return to the track – not surprisingly, he completed only 24 laps in FP1, compared to 34 by Russell and 41 by the Leclerc-Verstappen duo – due to a Mercedes power unit problem that the team was unable to fix in time to send him back out. Antonelli thus had to watch from the pits as his rivals set fast laps at the end of the session on soft tires, which dropped him down to P5 in the standings.
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The hope, for him and for Mercedes, is that all technical difficulties with the PU are resolved before the start of the Sprint qualifying, the first truly significant session of this weekend in Florida.
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