FP1 Results 2026 Singapore GP: Russell Fastest, Verstappen Flies on Mediums

George Russell topped the only practice session Formula 1 will get in Singapore before things turn serious, and normally that would be a story worth taking at face value. It isn’t. Not when Max Verstappen was busy being half a second clear of the entire field on the tyre that actually matters this weekend, while Russell’s benchmark came on rubber nobody will touch again until qualifying.

One Session, Zero Representative Conditions

Singapore’s sprint format strips the weekend down to a single free practice session, and this one was run in conditions nobody will see again: a 53C track surface baking under the Marina Bay sun, hours before the lights come on for a race that happens entirely at night. Everyone knew it was a throwaway hour for anything resembling raceable data, which is presumably why half the grid went hunting for banker laps the moment the pitlane light turned green.

Every car bar the two Cadillacs rolled out on hard tyres to start, with Kimi Antonelli setting the initial pace on the white-walled compound at 1m33.830s, just 0.034s clear of Charles Leclerc and 0.056s up on team-mate Russell. Isack Hadjar was fourth and unhappy about it, reporting that his Red Bull was bottoming heavily through the braking zones and that his throttle pedal had turned slippery underfoot. Oscar Piastri, Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton were within six tenths of the pace, and everyone else was already more than a second off, led by Audi’s Nico Hulkenberg.

Hulkenberg’s Gearbox Gives Up

With twenty minutes left on the clock, Hulkenberg’s session ended abruptly on the main straight. “Something bad happened on the gearbox,” he reported over the radio, before being wheeled back to the pits as a virtual safety car neutralised proceedings. It is the sort of midfield gremlin that barely registers on a normal Friday, but on a weekend with no FP2 or FP3 to fall back on, losing running time is a genuine headache for Audi heading into sprint qualifying.

The stoppage did at least shuffle the order further down the field, with Liam Lawson briefly jumping ahead of Verstappen on hard tyres before everyone switched to softer compounds for the closing quarter of an hour.

Russell’s Soft-Tyre Flyer

Once the soft tyres went on, Russell made the rest of the field look ordinary. Still running Mercedes’ older specification car as part of the team’s back-to-back comparison with the upgrade introduced at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, he banged in a 1m32.274s that was two tenths clear of Leclerc and Norris, with Hamilton and Piastri a further three tenths back. Those five, plus the two Cadillacs trundling round at the back, were the only runners to bother with the soft compound at all.

It’s a tidy enough headline time, and Russell will take it, especially given he faces a grid penalty after a fresh power unit. As already confirmed, he starts Sunday’s race from the back of the grid after a fresh power unit, so a quick FP1 lap is about the only tangible reward he’ll get from this weekend’s early running. Mercedes is using the session to run Antonelli in the latest-spec W17 while Russell samples the older car in what the team is calling an experimental role, 84 points adrift of his title-leading team-mate and apparently now doing research and development duty as well as driving.

Verstappen Quietly Making the Point That Matters

Buried under Russell’s soft-tyre time was the number that should concern McLaren and Ferrari rather more. On medium tyres, Max Verstappen set a 1m33.006s that was half a second faster than anyone else on that rubber, including championship leader Leclerc, who ran wide into the Turn 16 escape road on his final flying lap. Hadjar, by contrast, was seven tenths off his team-mate’s medium-tyre pace, a significant gap between the two Red Bull drivers.

Verstappen arrives in Singapore off the back of a Bahrain Grand Prix win in Malaysia that pulled him level with Michael Schumacher’s record of 72 wins for one team, as covered in this breakdown of the achievement. A single practice benchmark on a throwaway Friday doesn’t rewrite a championship that still has him 132 points off the top, but it’s exactly the kind of signal that tends to precede a Verstappen weekend nobody else enjoys.

The Midfield Shuffle

Further back, Pierre Gasly led the midfield pack on mediums with a 1m34.038s, one tenth up on Lawson’s Racing Bulls and three tenths clear of Haas’ Oliver Bearman. Aston Martin, Williams and Audi were tightly bunched further down the order, though Aston Martin’s showing was carried entirely by Fernando Alonso, fresh off scoring the team’s first points since August in Bahrain, while Lance Stroll reported brake trouble of his own.

Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas propped up the timesheet in the two Cadillacs, continuing a season in which the new team has yet to register so much as a single point. A sub-optimal, dusty track surface didn’t help anyone searching for grip, but it mattered rather less to the two cars at the back of the grid.

Straight Into Business

There’s no FP2 or FP3 to digest any of this before it counts. Sprint qualifying starts at 12:30 UTC today, with the sprint race itself following on Saturday at 09:00 UTC, before qualifying for Sunday’s Grand Prix at 13:00 UTC and the race itself getting underway at 12:00 UTC on Sunday, check the calendar for your local time. On a weekend with this little room to find answers, Verstappen’s medium-tyre pace looks like the only genuinely useful data point from an otherwise forgettable hour in the Marina Bay heat.

Full FP1 Classification