• Mercedes flying out of the block

Valtteri Bottas finished FP1 0.039 seconds ahead of championship leader and teammate Lewis Hamilton at round six of the 2020 calendar at the Spanish GP.

On top of that, again, Max Verstappen, at the venue where he got his first race win, was the only driver to get within a second of the Mercedes putting his Red Bull in P3.

Bottas impressing himself highly with this outcome as he has now fallen to third in the championship, needing a pick me up after a difficult two weeks at Silverstone.

  • Ferrari chassis solution

The one person everyone kept an eye on throughout this session was Sebastian Vettel and his Ferrari after the chassis on his side of the garage was changed.

As of this first practice it has seemed to work for the four-time world champion as he was only 0.011 seconds behind teammate Charles Leclerc who put his Ferrari in P4.

Behind the top five, Haas put in a better performance than what people were expecting with Romain Grosjean putting the car in P6 and Kevin Magnussen in P9.

  • Midfield battle never wains

The ever-present battle of McLaren, Racing Point, Renault and Alpha Tauri still appears to be as tight as ever. Sergio Perez took that step up after two races away and put in a good set of runs to place P7.

P10 to P14 were all occupied by these teams all ending up within 0.245 seconds of each other. The only slight changes we can see in the tightness compared to the start of the season is that Racing Point is consistently at the front of this battle whereas Alpha Tauri is constantly rearing the battle.

With the teams already having numerous laps of data from pre-season testing, practice becomes much more team-friendly already just having to fine-tune the data already collected. Unfortunately, it would not be surprising if the teams lined up in Noahs Ark fashion.