Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen shared the practice spoils across the opening two Formula 1 sessions at Monza, as Sergio Perez crashed but still hailed his “best Friday in a while”.
FP1 and FP2 provided hints of who will succeed in the 2023 Italian Grand Prix – the winner of which will receive a specially designed trophy inspired by the exhaust pipes used on F1 cars. This has been commissioned by Pirelli and created by Italian artist Ruth Beraha.
She took simultaneous inspiration from the Greek myth of Typhon, a giant with 100 snakes wrapped around his head. Hopefully just as vividly, here’s everything we learned across two practice sessions of F1 cars snaking their way through Monza’s former royal park – sadly bereft after around 10,000 trees came down during a July thunderstorm – on Friday.
In FP1, Verstappen led the way by just 0.046s over Sainz – in a session where attention once again turned to Pirelli’s Alternative Tyre Allocation (ATA) experiment.
As was the case in Hungary, teams have two fewer tyre sets available this weekend (11 versus 13 as usual), as F1 assesses whether it can transport fewer around the world. Pirelli also hopes the teams will have greater strategic variance as a result of being restricted to running hard rubber on each car in Q1, mediums in Q2 and softs in Q3.
This all meant the teams were very frugal in the number of tyre sets they deployed in FP1, with Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes using just the hards, Aston Martin and Haas staying on the mediums and Alpine, McLaren, Alfa Romeo, AlphaTauri and Williams sticking with the softs.
The lower tyre sets total, plus there being no requirement to save a big collection of softs to use throughout qualifying, means each driver should theoretically have multiple sets of all three compounds available for Sunday’s race. Typically at non-ATA races, they may only have one or two new hards or mediums and perhaps no new softs, depending on wear levels at different tracks.
All these considerations meant Pirelli was able to go a compound step softer compared to the 2022 event here, with C3-C4-C5 the selection versus C2-C3-C4. Its motorsport boss Mario Isola said during FP1 his company is happy with the ATA information gathered so far, but feels it does need some “fine-tuning”.
Source: Autosport