Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc set the pace in Friday practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix which offered few clues as to the true competitive picture.
Leclerc was 0.015 seconds quicker than McLaren’s Lando Norris but world champion Max Verstappen was only 11th fastest and Mercedes close to the back.
The Alpines of Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon were third and fifth fastest, sandwiching Yuki Tsunoda’s Alpha Tauri.
Daniel Ricciardo, returning to Formula 1 with Alpha Tauri, was 14th.
The Australian was 0.451secs slower than team-mate Tsunoda.
A new approach to tyre allocation for the weekend seems to have changed the way teams approached practice.
The number of sets of tyres available to each driver has been reduced, and they are required to use different compounds for all three parts of qualifying – hards in the first session, medium in the second, and softs in the final top 10 shootout.
The usual pattern of set-up runs, followed by qualifying simulation and then race simulation was not followed by all teams.
Red Bull and Mercedes, for example, seemed not to do qualifying simulation runs, at least not representative ones.
As well as Verstappen in 11th, his team-mate Sergio Perez, whose weekend got off to a bad start with a crash on his first lap in first practice, was down in 18th, and Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and George Russell 16th and 20th.
There were some race-simulation runs later in the session, though.
Mercedes, Aston Martin and McLaren chose the medium tyres, and Norris appeared to be the fastest, followed by Alonso – who was eighth fastest overall on a single lap – and Hamilton.
Red Bull and Ferrari chose the soft tyres for their race runs, and although Leclerc started strongly, Verstappen was comfortably quicker over a series of laps.
