Ferrari hits trouble as George Russell leads Max Verstappen while McLaren rookie Alex Dunne impresses in Austrian GP practice

The first practice session for the Austrian Grand Prix weekend is done and dusted, and George Russell appeared as the early leader, but Ferrari appeared to have hit a roadblock. The Mercedes driver continued his strong performance from the Canadian GP and narrowly took the top spot home as Max Verstappen posted a lap time less than a tenth of a second slower than the Briton.

After a week's break, F1 returned to racing as the premieres for the much-awaited 'F1: The Movie' were taking place in the United States and Europe. But the atmosphere within the paddock quickly shifted from entertainment to racing at the Styrian Hills in Austria.

Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris had sat out the session for respective rookie FP1 outings in their teams. The Monegasque was replaced by Dino Beganovic, who had earlier subbed in for him in Bahrain, but had a subpar showing of pace as he finished the session in 18th.

On the other hand, Norris' substitute, Alexander Dunne, was in control of the McLaren MCL39, who finished the session in fourth with less than seven-hundredths of a second separating them. Meanwhile, Alex Albon, Gabriel Bortoleto, and Kimi Antonelli appeared as the long runners, after all of them completed 35 laps around the Red Bull Ring.

Apart from this, the top of the timing sheets was occupied by George Russell and Max Verstappen. The two were split apart by 65 milliseconds, but a heap of track evolution is expected to take place as the fastest laptime posted by the Mercedes driver, a 1:05:542s, was over 1.2 seconds slower than last year.

In the meantime, the Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton was expected to be a fair bit faster owing to the plethora of upgrades the car fielded. Despite this, the seven-time champion was only able to claim a ninth-place finish in the FP1 classifications, showcasing the work that the Italian giant still needed to do.

---

Lewis Hamilton is glad to tackle performance challenges with Ferrari

Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton at the Austrian Grand Prix weekend - Source: Getty

Though Ferrari has not had the greatest start to its F1 season in 2025 after being a title contender last year, new joinee Lewis Hamilton was not downbeat about that. The Briton has had an illustrious career in F1 and hoped to rebuild the Italian empire in the racing landscape.

While the 40-year-old accepted that he would have wanted to fight for wins and championships outright, he was fine with the current state of affairs at Ferrari, as he said, via Formula 1:

"Would we prefer it if we were straight away just winning races? I'm sure people in the garage wish we were straight away winning but I think, for me, I'm grateful we're going through this process. We're doing a lot of building, there are a lot of changes that need to be made that we're working towards.

"I'm focused more on changes in the background, foundation building stuff that we need to put in place in order to have a better 2026."

On the other hand, Charles Leclerc will return to drive the Ferrari SF-25 for the remainder of the weekend.