Report: First 2026 Friday finished

Alex and Carlos begin the season with two interrupted Free Practice sessions

Published

06 MAR 2026

Est. reading time

3 min

Atlassian Williams F1 Team began the 2026 season with Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz tackling the first FP1 and FP2 sessions of the year in Melbourne.

Teething problems saw Alex stopping at the side of the road towards the end of free practice 1, while Carlos spent much of free practice 2 in the garage while the team investigated an issue.

Nonetheless, there was plenty of learnings for both of our drivers, with 54 laps completed in FP1 and a further 40 in FP2, allowing our engineers to pore over nearly 100 laps of data.

Carlos finished ahead in that first session, ending his first hour of Australia with a 1:22.323 to sit P12. Alex, hindered by his on-track stoppage, saw his best effort of 1:23.130 earn P15.

That was the same position by the end of FP2 for Albono, too, this time with a 1:21.847.

Twenty-one race simulation laps on the Hard compound accompanied 10 soft-tyre tours of the picturesque Albert Park for Alex in that second free practice.

For Carlos, a 1:22.253 came earlier in the hour to leave him in P17 with nine laps completed before he returned to the pit lane midway through FP2.

Sadly that concluded his on-track action for Friday, but both drivers will be raring to go across Saturday and Sunday when the competitive sessions begin.

With all teams adjusting to the new regulations, Williams will spend the time before tomorrow’s FP3 like our 10 peers by assessing the data to maximise our pace for Quali.

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Angelos Tsiaparas, Chief Engineer:

“Melbourne poses particular challenges in terms of energy and deployment with the new regulations - it is one of the 'energy poor' circuits, as we call it - so a lot of the focus on the engineering side has been on driving styles and techniques we can come up with to maximise energy harvesting and deployment, and we have another free practice tomorrow to try and optimise that ahead of qualifying. What we observed in Bahrain testing remains the case - the top four teams are ahead and the midfield is close together, so our aspiration is to try and be at the top of the midfield weekend after weekend."

Alex Albon

“The first race weekend with the new regs was always going to be a challenge and so it wasn't our smoothest day. We got a bit caught out struggling with some data and getting in tune with the car but we will review our learnings from both free practice sessions and how we can apply that to tomorrow. We have some work to do in understanding the deployment around this track and what’s the most efficient way to deploy and harvest. We’re going to spend a lot of time overnight working with the simulator team and find simulation tools to try and come up with a better setup for tomorrow. There’s a lot we can improve ahead of qualifying and it is all part of the learning curve."

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Report: First 2026 Friday finished

Alex and Carlos begin the season with two interrupted Free Practice sessions