Verstappen and Russell suffer misery in mystery Mexican practice

Max Verstappen and George Russell suffered a miserable second practice session for very different reasons ahead of the Mexico City Grand Prix.

Verstappen managed just four laps and failed to set a time due to his Red Bull being plagued by power unit issues, whilst Russell suffered a damaging 30g crash in his Mercedes.

Verstappen's PU woes first materialised at the end of FP1. With five minutes remaining, a slowing Verstappen radioed in to say, "There's something wrong with the engine. It's not nice. There's no power."

It was declared to be an air leak, but on Verstappen's initial foray in FP2, he again complained he could "still hear a weird noise in the engine," later adding, "This noise is very disturbing. It can't be normal."

Forced to box, Red Bull was able to carry out additional repairs during the time lost for the red flags that flew 12 minutes in after Russell was involved in his second major accident in the space of a week.

Russell crashed heavily in qualifying last Saturday ahead of the United States GP, which resulted in a pit lane start following various component changes.

Seven days later, Russell buried his W15 into a Tecpro barrier at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, slamming into it sideways after the car bottomed out as he ran over the kerb at the high-speed Turn 8. That sent Russell into a spin, and off at Turn 9.

It was clear it was a heavy impact as the Briton clambered out of the cockpit gingerly, holding his ribs, before being taken to the medical centre for the typical precautionary checks. He was later released.

Due to the damage sustained to the barriers, the session did not start for another 23 minutes.

Sainz fastest, but what does it mean?

Russell was running on a medium option tyre for next season, as the session was devoted to assessing Pirelli's 2025 rubber, and extended to 90 minutes from the traditional 60.

Known as an in-competition test, all drivers and teams followed a specific programme established by the Pirelli engineers, including a performance run and a long run on unmarked rubber. Every team ran the same number of laps with the same quantity of fuel on board, dependent on the type of run.

The only exception was for the five drivers who sat out FP1 to allow a rookie an outing, in this case, Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton, Lando Norris in his McLaren, Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso, Charles Leclerc of Ferrari, and Stake's Zhou Guanyu.

They only took part in the Pirelli test for 60 minutes, with the other 30 designed to allow them to get up to speed on this year's tyres and acquire data ahead of qualifying and the grand prix.

At the end of the performance runs, with 20 kilograms of fuel on the car, Ferrari's Carlos Sainz was quickest with a lap of 1:17.699s, followed by McLaren's Oscar Piastri, who was 0.178s adrift and a thousandth-of-a-second faster than RB's Yuki Tsunoda. Charles Leclerc was also within two-tenths of a second of his team-mate.

Norris was fifth quickest, managing a run on this year's medium tyres late on, with a lap of 1:17.948s, which included the best final sector.

Haas' Kevin Magnussen was just over half a second down in sixth, followed by Hamilton, Stake's Valtteri Bottas, Sergio Perez in his Red Bull, and RB's Liam Lawson, who completed the top 10, finishing 0.861s down.

After a crash in FP1, following a collision with Ferrari reserve Ollie Bearman, who will drive for Haas next season, and despite hard work to repair the car, Williams was unable to get the Thai-British driver on track.