The Friday practice bragging rights ahead of Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix belonged to Max Verstappen, who headed FP2 while FP1 chart-topper Carlos Sainz crashed in the second session.
Collecting a 1m12.462s despite none of his sector times being of sufficient quality to grace the timing boards in purple, Verstappen stitched together a consistent trio of splits to ensure he made the most of his Red Bull RB19 across the whole duration of the lap. This carried him above the Ferraris of Sainz and Charles Leclerc, the former having truncated his session with a clash with the inside wall on the exit of the Swimming Pool section.
Sainz had set the pace in the first session, three-tenths ahead of countryman Fernando Alonso, and was once again among the front-runners before producing a near carbon copy of team-mate Leclerc’s qualifying crash in the Principality in 2021. The red flag delayed the obligatory late-session race simulations, but a swift clean-up operation offered 12 minutes of uninterrupted running at the end.
This nonetheless impacted the level of information that the teams could glean but, as is often the case at Monaco, nailing the qualifying runs was nonetheless the priority.
Here’s everything we learned from Friday practice in Monaco.