Melbourne’s first proper day of 2026 running delivered exactly what you’d expect from a brand-new regulations cycle: a few encouraging signs, a few bruised egos, and at least one team already staring into the abyss.
On the stopwatch, the headline was Oscar Piastri ending Friday on top in FP2 with a 1:19.729. It was the sort of lap that lands well locally — crisp, confident, and done without any theatrics — even if he’d also been muttering about engine niggles earlier in the day. In a paddock that still doesn’t really know what “normal” looks like under these rules, quick laps matter less than the shape of the day, and Piastri’s had the right shape: bother in the morning, response in the afternoon, and a home crowd suddenly allowing itself a little imagination.
The more interesting read-across, though, sat behind him. Mercedes leaving FP2 with P2 and P3 didn’t feel like a Friday mirage; it looked annoyingly solid. Pre-season talk had already pointed in that direction and, on first evidence, the car seems to do the boring-but-deadly things well: it gets through a session without drama, it repeats its performance, and it’s where it should be when the tyres and fuel loads start to converge. Plenty will change by Saturday, but if you’re scanning the timing pages for the first hints of hierarchy, Mercedes’ footprint was the heavy one.
FP1, meanwhile, belonged to Ferrari. Charles Leclerc ended the opening session quickest after an early back-and-forth with Max Verstappen, which at least supplied a familiar rhythm amid all the unfamiliar machinery. Nobody sensible is declaring trends after the first practice of a new era, yet it was notable how quickly the front-runners slipped into their old habits: the same names, the same tiny margins, the same sense that — for all the technical upheaval — speed still finds the usual suspects.
The session also came with the inevitable “welcome back” gremlins. Nearly the whole field got laps in, but the caveat is doing a lot of work there. Piastri had those engine concerns, and elsewhere there were the sort of interruptions teams insist are “part of learning” right up until they aren’t.
At Aston Martin, it already isn’t. Fernando Alonso didn’t even get to take part in FP1 thanks to a power unit issue, and by the time the team had regrouped, the wider picture sounded ugly. Adrian Newey, now in Aston colours and never one to waste words when he thinks something has been mishandled, painted a grim portrait of their Honda situation: Aston, he said, discovered only around 30% of Honda’s championship-winning engine group remained in place, and the project is behind schedule.
Even by early-season standards, that’s an extraordinary thing to have hanging over you on day one — not just the performance deficit, but the implied organisational shock. Newey also revealed Aston has just two batteries available, both currently in the cars. In other words, this isn’t simply about chasing lap time; it’s about having enough functioning hardware to run a normal weekend, let alone develop.
That sort of constraint changes how a team behaves. It affects how hard drivers can push in practice, how much mileage engineers can responsibly attempt, and how aggressively the factory can iterate parts. It’s the difference between “we’re not quick yet” and “we’re not operating yet”, and Melbourne already felt like it was veering toward the latter. If Aston is going to rescue its season, the first victory might simply be getting through a Friday without the schedule being rewritten by missing components.
If Aston’s story was a slow-burn crisis, FP2 offered a more immediate kind of chaos. George Russell found himself in the stewards’ office twice. The first was a pitlane collision with Arvid Lindblad — Russell attempting to force his way into the fast lane and clouting the other car in the process — and the second concerned practice starts in the wrong area.
Russell walked away without any meaningful sporting damage: a reprimand for the pitlane incident and a warning for the start procedure. For him and Mercedes, that’s probably a fair outcome — the kind of slap on the wrist the stewards hand out on Friday when they’d rather not distort a Grand Prix over something avoidable but not malicious. Still, it was a reminder that even the “clean” weekends can carry little moments that cost confidence, time, and goodwill in the garage.
Elsewhere in FP2, Lewis Hamilton had to take avoiding action when he came across a slow-moving Franco Colapinto on the main straight — the sort of incident that, in any other session, would trigger a torrent of radio outrage. Here, it was filed under “first-weekend untidiness” and quickly swallowed by the next thing.
Then there was the off-track tension bubbling through the day, courtesy of Stefano Domenicali. The F1 CEO and president, speaking in a pre-season interview, took aim at Hamilton and Verstappen for criticising the new rules, calling it “wrong” for drivers to “talk bad” about a world that allows everyone in it to grow. Domenicali added that he listens, but his message was clear enough: sell the show, don’t sour it.
That’s a tricky line to walk, and it always has been. Drivers aren’t PR machines, and the best of them have never pretended to be. They’ll tell you when they think something’s gone sideways — sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes brutally — and the sport’s leadership will continue to prefer that dissatisfaction is channelled into private meetings rather than public soundbites. But if 2026 is going to be a season of adjustment, it will also be a season of opinions, because new rules don’t just change lap times; they change what it feels like to drive an F1 car at the limit.
So that was Friday: Piastri quick at home, Mercedes ominously consistent, Ferrari and Red Bull hovering in familiar territory, and Aston already dealing with a supply-and-schedule headache that sounds less like teething troubles and more like a structural problem. Melbourne hasn’t even started qualifying yet, but the new era has begun in earnest — with all the messiness that phrase implies.
