Aston Martin rears its head at British Grand Prix first practice

At least Aston Martin changes the trend: Lance Stroll was second and Alonso, sixth in the first free practice of the British GP. After two weekends wandering around the last third of the grid, the AMR24 is making progress at the start of the competition at Silverstone.

Lando Norris sets the pace at Silverstone

They released a front wing that does not change much the morphology of the previous one. Fernando tried it in the first half of the session and then switched to the old one to compare the performance of both. They are now clearer about the weaknesses of a delicate car, like all in this generation of cars, which is difficult to bring to the optimal working window. But when it works, it works well. The position is unreal because neither Mercedes nor the two Ferraris mounted the soft Pirelli. In any case, it looks much more like a fifth car than it did in Barcelona and Austria.

The first practice left Norris with the best time of the morning at Silverstone ahead of Lance and Piastri. Verstappen was third without using the soft tire. Sainz was ninth, half a second behind, although in his case he did not improve his time on the medium tire and his best lap came on the hard tire.

The track was not fantastic either: the asphalt temperature rose progressively from 24 to 27ºC but the weather was not entirely favorable with drops of light rain at the beginning, cloudy skies and annoying gusts of wind.

First free practice at the 2024 British GP standings

There were just a couple of minor incidents. Tsunoda lost control of his car and ended up in the gravel, so the red flag went out to recover the car. And Piastri ran out of power on the way to the pit-lane, although the McLaren mechanics recovered the MCL38 without stopping the final minutes of the session.

Practice 2 will take place later this afternoon at 4 p.m. local time (12 noon EDT / 9 a.m. PDT), with qualifying tomorrow at the slightly earlier time of 3 p.m. local time (11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT).

So, Verstappen (4th, 0.309), Russell (5th, 0.318), Hamilton (7th, 0.438), Leclerc (8th, 0.483) and Sainz (9th, 0.505) will test the softest tire of the Pirelli range. And everything will return, more or less, to normal. The starters who gave their car to ‘rookies’ will also return. Jack Doohan (Apine), Isaak Hadjar (Red Bull), Franco Colapinto (Williams) and Oliver Bearman (Haas). The latter has his seat guaranteed in 2024.