Bottas over Hamilton in opening Spanish GP practice

Valtteri Bottas

Valtteri Bottas dominated opening practice for the Spanish GP in Barcelona with a time of 1m18.148s to beat his Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton by 0.849s as Robert Kubica made his official race weekend comeback with Williams..

Sebastian Vettel was third quick for Ferrari but almost 1-second per lap off of Bottas' pace.

Max Verstappen (who didn't hit anything yet) put his Red Bull 4th while Kimi Raikkonen in the 2nd Ferrari rounded out the top-5.

So far we have only seen three teams sample the red supersoft rubber – Williams, Renault and Ferrari. Those leading times from the Mercedes duo were set on soft tires as Aldo Costa begins to work his magic on developing the Mercedes each race.

Home favorite Fernando Alonso led the midfield pack for McLaren by finishing sixth, 1.7 seconds back from Bottas’ headline time, with teammate Stoffel Vandoorne taking ninth as a number of new updates were debuted on the MCL33 car.

Haas teammates Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen finishing P8 and P11 respectively, split by Vandoorne and Toro Rosso’s Pierre Gasly, the latter completing the top 10.

Charles Leclerc continued his impressive form following his charge to sixth in Baku as he finished 12th ahead of the Force India and Renault drivers, with Sergio Perez leading from Carlos Sainz Jr., teammate Esteban Ocon and Nico Hulkenberg.

Hartley recovered from his near-miss with the wall at Turn 4 to finish 17th ahead of Marcus Ericsson as the Williams duo of Kubica and Stroll propped up the running order.

This session was largely used to try a few things and clean the track. The serious work begins in Practice 2.

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