The Silver Arrows delivered a dominant 1-2 in the season’s first sprint weekend practice, leaving rivals over half a second adrift just hours before sprint qualifying.

The 2026 Formula 1 season’s first sprint weekend began with an unmistakable message at Shanghai: George Russell and Kimi Antonelli are the class of the field on a single flying lap. With the only practice session of the Chinese Grand Prix serving as the paddock’s sole data-gathering window ahead of sprint qualifying (the format where the sprint race grid is set in a compressed, single-elimination shootout), Mercedes left no room for ambiguity. Russell topped the timesheet at 1m32.741s, with Antonelli just 0.120s behind and their gap to the rest of the field stretching beyond half a second.

The session’s trajectory told the real story. Through the medium-tyre runs early on, the field appeared broadly competitive, with Russell leading Leclerc and Piastri while Hamilton was the only frontrunner to use the soft compound before the final phase. When the field switched to softs in the closing 15 minutes, Mercedes’ advantage crystallized in a way that will have focused minds across the pitlane. Lando Norris was the closest challenger at 1m33.296s, with Piastri and Leclerc completing the top five. Hamilton, meanwhile, found himself 1.388s off his former team.

The concerns extend to the championship’s established powers. Max Verstappen posted only the eighth-fastest time, a troubling 1.8 seconds from the front on what is typically one of his strongest formats, with rookie Isack Hadjar 13th. The midfield battle was fiercely compact: Oliver Bearman led the pack in seventh for Haas, holding a two-tenth advantage over Audi’s Nico Hulkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, with Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson a further tenth away.

Williams was visibly off the pace, and both their drivers head into sprint qualifying carrying additional concerns. Carlos Sainz spent the first 35 minutes in the garage due to a data systems issue, managing just 18 laps on a weekend format that offers no recovery time. Sainz had already missed qualifying in Australia due to a technical failure. Arvid Lindblad (Racing Bulls) suffered an early mechanical retirement and completed no meaningful soft-tyre preparation at all.

The session also produced a string of incidents. Franco Colapinto spun on his very first out-lap at Turn 9 on his Alpine debut in Shanghai. Leclerc locked up at Turn 6, losing control as his DRS (the moveable rear wing flap that reduces drag on straights to allow higher top speeds) closed mid-braking. Norris and Hamilton narrowly avoided a collision through the final corner. Cadillac’s Sergio Perez completed just 13 laps.

With Mercedes carrying a half-second buffer into sprint qualifying, the pressure falls on McLaren and Ferrari to close what looks, on this evidence, like a very real pace gap. Shanghai is one session into the weekend. The pecking order, however, looks anything but temporary.

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