Verstappen finishes on top in FP3, whilst Albon claims close P2 finish

Max Verstappen has claimed the top spot in the final practice session of the weekend a the Mexican Grand Prix. The Red Bull driver finished ahead of Alex Albon and, his teammate, Sergio Perez, with a lap time of 1:17.887.

The session started off extremely slow, with George Russell and Verstappen topping the timings chart for the first two-thirds of the hour before Albon took the lead.

Drivers weren’t struggling too much with the grip as the session went on, however, early on it seemed that rear sliding was the main issue for lost lap time. Lando Norris lost a large chunk of time coming out of the stadium section because of a slide, whilst Pierre Gasly spun around entering the stadium section due to taking too much of the kerb.

The grip and track speed improved majorly as the session entered its latter stages and this saw some interesting lap times come out. Albon’s top spot was held for a short period of time before Verstappen stole it off him by only 0.07 seconds. The Dutchman swiftly went onto team radio to report that he had a lot of traffic in front of him, potentially meaning that he could’ve had a larger gap to the Thai driver if things went his way.

As for Mercedes and McLaren, Russell found himself in the top five for the majority of the hour and had some good lap times, which could bode well for qualifying later today. Lewis Hamilton and Norris were in the top 10 for more of the session than Oscar Piastri, but the Australian ended up on top. Piastri finished in P5, with Norris and Hamilton in P8 and P10 respectively.

Valtteri Bottas and the AlphaTauri duo of Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo took the final places in the top 10. Ferrari struggled with traffic towards the end of the hour and placed in 13th and 15th, with Charles Leclerc finishing ahead of Carlos Sainz.