McLarens on top as grass fires, crashes disrupt Japanese Grand Prix practice at Suzuka

SUZUKA – Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris topped the times for McLaren as four red flags, two caused by trackside grass fires, wreaked havoc with the second practice session for the Japanese Grand Prix on April 4.

Australian Piastri, the winner of the last race in China, squeezed in a lap of 1min 28.114sec between the last two red flags to take the honours on a sunny but cool day at the Suzuka circuit.

Championship leader Norris was fastest in first practice and second in the later session, some four-tenths of a second ahead of Racing Bulls’ French rookie Isack Hadjar.

The level of disruption in the second session meant several drivers were unable to get out for extended runs, leaving plenty for them and their teams to figure out in the final practice before qualifying on April 5.

“It’s been a bit of an up-and-down day but there’s definitely been positives in there. FP2 was a pretty stop-start session, which made it tricky to go through everything, but there were still some good learnings. A couple of tweaks and we’ll be good to go,” said Piastri.

The second session was little more than seven minutes old when Jack Doohan’s Alpine spun off the track at the first corner, skidded across the gravel and slammed into a wall.

The Australian rookie, who had been replaced by reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa for first practice, looked shaken as he was helped to walk away from the wreckage of his car. The team later said he had undergone medical checks and was “okay”.

The cars were kept off the track for 22 minutes and had returned for only three minutes, when the session was red flagged again after Spaniard Fernando Alonso came off the track and got his Aston Martin stuck in the gravel.

A seven-minute stoppage was followed by five minutes of action before a patch of grass at the trackside caught fire, bringing the red flags out again.

Piastri got his flying lap in to pip Norris to the top of the timesheets before another patch of grass, perhaps ignited by sparks from a passing car, went up in flames to bring a premature end to the session.

It was a disappointing session for the crowd, who had earlier cheered Japan’s Yuki Tsunoda to the sixth-fastest time in the opening session for Red Bull. He was promoted from the Racing Bulls team at the expense of Liam Lawson last week.

Crucially, Tsunoda was only a tenth of a second behind his teammate Max Verstappen in fifth place, a big improvement on the pace managed by the New Zealander in the first two races of the season.

“I think we can say today was okay, but it could have been better,” Tsunoda said.

Four-time world champion Verstappen complained about understeer in the second session, when he was over half a second off the pace with the eighth-fastest time.

“It is quite difficult to put the lap down,” the Dutchman said. “You need quite a lot of confidence and commitment around here and, at the moment, I feel like I still have a bit of work to do.”

Lawson, back at Racing Bulls after only two races, was only able to manage the 13th-fastest time in the opening session but was up to fifth in the second.

Mercedes will take some comfort from George Russell being the front runner for much of the first session and clocking the second-fastest lap, ahead of the Ferrari duo of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in third and fourth.

“There’s clearly a gap to McLaren that we need to chip away at,” said Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside racing engineer.

“But that looks more like just a normal development race that we need to get stuck into, rather than trying to get on top of any of the handling vices that we’ve had.”

REUTERS