REPORT: Stunted Day of Practice Running in Singapore

It was a disrupted first day of running for Atlassian Williams Racing at the Marina Bay Street Circuit, as the on-track action began in earnest ahead of the 2025 Singapore Grand Prix.

While Carlos Sainz was able to put some good lap times down in the first session of the day, ultimately ending the opening hour in P8 under the setting sun – a best time of 1:31812.

Across the other side of the garage, Alex Albon’s running was cut short after a fire broke out in his rear brake ducts. That was enough to rule him out of most of the opening session, but the team did superbly to repair any damage in time for FP2.

That said, neither Alex nor Carlos were truly able to maximise the second session of the day, as multiple red flags caused repeated disruption to the only nighttime Practice of the weekend.

Crashes from both George Russell and Liam Lawson meant that teams had reduced time to gather data from what is the only indicative session ahead of Qualifying at the same time on Saturday night.

Nonetheless, Carlos was able to place himself near the top of the leaderboard in both instances, finishing in P8 once more with a 1:31.299. With his FW47 repaired, Alex was able to record a best of 1:32.060, wrapping Friday in P13.

"We’ve been relatively competitive all day," said Carlos after the session.

"In FP2 we went with a different car setup and I struggled a bit more compared to FP1, losing a bit of confidence, so we’ll look into reverting back to the original configuration.

"We’ve got some homework to do tonight, as again we seem to struggle on the softs.

"Qualifying position is everything here, so we need to get into the right rhythm and make the right choices ahead of tomorrow."

"Not our best Friday today," summarised Alex.

"Unfortunately, we had an issue in FP1 with our rear brakes, so we didn’t get any track running in and started the day on the back foot.

"It is so important to get laps in around this circuit because the track is so peaky and the windows are very small, so not getting subsequent laps puts you in a position where you just keep trying to learn the circuit.

"It was a very disjointed day, especially with the red and yellow flags, but we’ll see what we can understand from today and look to restart tomorrow."