Ferrari made the perfect start to its home Italian Grand Prix weekend as Charles Leclerc topped the opening free practice session at Monza, leading teammate Lewis Hamilton to a convincing one-two for the Scuderia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leclerc set the fastest lap of the session with a time of 1:23.008<\/strong>, edging Hamilton by just 0.173 seconds<\/strong>. The result immediately delighted the thousands of Ferrari fans who filled the historic Monza circuit, providing an early boost for the team ahead of Sunday’s race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Russell was the closest non-Ferrari driver, finishing third for Mercedes, 0.304s<\/strong> behind Leclerc. Red Bull’s Liam Lawson, once again standing in for the injured Isack Hadjar, impressed with fourth place, while championship leader Kimi Antonelli completed the top five.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ferrari’s strong performance comes after the team introduced an updated power unit for the high-speed Monza circuit. The upgrade appears to have helped the SF-26, particularly in terms of energy management and overall efficiency around the track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hamilton also enjoyed a positive start to his first Italian Grand Prix weekend as a Ferrari driver. The seven-time world champion is looking for a strong result at the team’s home race and will be hoping that the pace shown in FP1 can translate into qualifying and race performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McLaren, meanwhile, had a quieter session. Reigning world champion Lando Norris finished sixth, despite arriving at Monza on the back of consecutive victories in Hungary and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Further down the order, Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto produced an encouraging performance to finish eighth, while Franco Colapinto was ninth for Alpine. Alpine reserve driver Paul Aron completed the top ten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The session was briefly interrupted by a red flag after Cadillac development driver Colton Herta, who was taking part in the session in place of Sergio Perez, was forced to stop his car on track. Herta completed only five laps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although FP1 results do not necessarily reflect the true competitive order for qualifying or the race, Ferrari’s early advantage is certainly encouraging. With Leclerc and Hamilton leading the field, the pressure will now be on the rest of the grid to close the gap when the teams return to the track for FP2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the passionate Ferrari crowd at Monza, however, the message from the opening session could hardly have been better: the Scuderia has started its home weekend at the front.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ferrari made the perfect start to its home Italian Grand Prix weekend as Charles Leclerc topped the opening free practice session at Monza, leading teammate Lewis Hamilton to a convincing one-two for the Scuderia. Leclerc set the fastest lap of the session with a time of 1:23.008, edging Hamilton by just 0.173 seconds. The result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-f1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1965,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1963\/revisions\/1965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/giornalemotori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}