Barcelona F3: Piquet tops first practice of new era

Trident driver Piquet jumped to the top of the leaderboard in the last three minutes of Friday morning's 45-minute free practice session with a lap of 1m33.255s.

Red Bull junior Juri Vips steered his Hitech Grand Prix-run car to second, 0.009s behind Piquet, making the most of improving track conditions to move up the order in the closing minutes.

Ferrari Academy driver Robert Shwartzman had topped most of the session, initially clearing the field by half a second, but his time ended up 0.255s shy of Piquet's.

Niko Kari jumped up the order late on to give Trident two cars in the top four, with GP3 veteran Jake Hughes in fifth for new single-seater squad HWA.

Carlin’s Logan Sargeant took sixth ahead of Shwartzman’s fellow Ferrari junior and Prema teammate Marcus Armstrong.

Simo Laaksonen was eighth for MP Motorsport, ahead of the top ART Grand Prix car of David Beckmann, whose session was hampered by picking up front wing damage by making contact with Fabio Scherer at Turn 12. Renault junior Ye Yifei rounded out the top 10 for Hitech.

Another Hitech driver, Leonardo Pulcini, set the fastest pre-season testing lap at Barcelona this year, but could only manage 24th, nearly two seconds off the pace.

Pulcini, however, did not use a second set of tyres unlike most of his rivals, and described himself as "confident" heading into qualifying.

Practice results:

Cla	#	Driver	Team	Time	Gap
1	18	Pedro Piquet	Trident	1'33.255
2	21	Jüri Vips	Hitech Grand Prix	1'33.264	0.009
3	28	Robert Shwartzman	Prema Racing	1'33.510	0.255
4	19	Niko Kari	Trident	1'33.519	0.264
5	11	Jake Hughes	HWA Racelab	1'33.766	0.511
6	31	Logan Sargeant	Carlin Buzz Racing	1'33.879	0.624
7	26	Marcus Armstrong	Prema Racing	1'33.923	0.668
8	5	Simo Laaksonen	MP Motorsport	1'33.938	0.683
9	1	David Beckmann	ART Grand Prix	1'34.059	0.804
10	22	Ye Yifei	Hitech Grand Prix	1'34.144	0.889
11	27	Jehan Daruvala	Prema Racing	1'34.211	0.956
12	3	Christian Lundgaard	ART Grand Prix	1'34.237	0.982
13	17	Devlin DeFrancesco	Trident	1'34.301	1.046
14	10	Bent Viscaal	HWA Racelab	1'34.321	1.066
15	2	Max Fewtrell	ART Grand Prix	1'34.367	1.112
16	30	Felipe Drugovich	Carlin Buzz Racing	1'34.475	1.220
17	6	Richard Verschoor	MP Motorsport	1'34.608	1.353
18	12	Keyvan Andres	HWA Racelab	1'34.755	1.500
19	7	Lirim Zendeli	Sauber Junior Team by Charouz	1'34.860	1.605
20	29	Teppei Natori	Carlin Buzz Racing	1'34.877	1.622
21	23	Alex Peroni	Campos Racing	1'35.038	1.783
22	4	Liam Lawson	MP Motorsport	1'35.053	1.798
23	25	Sebastian Fernandez	Campos Racing	1'35.139	1.884
24	20	Leonardo Pulcini	Hitech Grand Prix	1'35.192	1.937
25	16	Andreas Estner	Jenzer Motorsport	1'35.219	1.964
26	14	Yuki Tsunoda	Jenzer Motorsport	1'35.573	2.318
27	9	Raoul Hyman	Sauber Junior Team by Charouz	1'35.725	2.470
28	15	Artem Petrov	Jenzer Motorsport	1'35.814	2.559
29	8	Fabio Scherer	Sauber Junior Team by Charouz	1'36.140	2.885
30	24	Alessio Deledda	Campos Racing	1'36.241	2.986
View full results