Arvid Lindblad might have earned himself a visit to the stewards for potentially impeding fellow rookie runner Pato O’Ward’s McLaren during FP1 for the Mexico Grand Prix, but he did enough to warrant glowing reviews from those who matter to his career: Red Bull’s leaders.
The headline news is that Lindblad’s fastest lap was 0.93s faster than Yuki Tsunoda in fundamentally the same car. Appearances can be deceptive in practice, given different run plans, fuel loads and engine settings, but Lindblad was clean and assured throughout, aside from riding over the kerbs at Turn 12 on his first push-lap on softs.
“He did a solid job,” said Red Bull driver advisor Helmut Marko, speaking exclusively to Autosport.
“I mean it was a difficult situation for him, everybody told him don’t do anything wrong, don’t crash, don’t make a scratch on the car, but he still delivered, he was by far the fastest rookie and his technical feedback was also very impressive.”
Although Lindblad completed 12 laps on hards at the beginning of the session and Tsunoda did 13 on the same compound, they were running on different plans at this point. Lindblad was more focused on track acclimatisation at this stage while Tsunoda was performing the first of two race-simulation runs on different fuel loads.
So while Lindblad was impressively quick when he had the opportunity on softs (albeit 0.617s off first-placed Charles Leclerc), the team had made a conscious decision to simplify the workload it would expect from a driver who was working towards racing on Sunday. Plus he was also driving the car Max Verstappen would be taking over from FP2 onwards, which has a minor update to the floor geometry.
Arvid Lindblad, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
“Yuki did a long run, he [Lindblad] didn’t, but at some stages they were on the same sort of run plan,” said Marko.
“We took the decision to leave Arvid on rather low-ish fuel,” said team principal Laurent Mekies. “Just not to give him the complications of low-high-low as we normally all do in FP1. But he did a very, very good job.
“It’s so difficult to jump in [to the car] in the context [of driving Verstappen’s car with new components installed]. He did a very good job, and as you can see the pace is there, so not much to argue against.”
Lindblad compromised his first push lap on softs by overcooking it into Turn 12 and riding over the kerbs, a common error at this point in the circuit where the back straight turns in to the Foro Sol stadium complex. He was not the only one to lose it there at this early stage in the running on a track which is so little-used that the surface is always slippery in FP1.
He then returned to the track on the same set of softs and set his quickest lap of 1m18.997s before seeing out the session on that set of tyres. Tsunoda’s run plan at this point consisted of two sets of out-push-in on softs, then going back out on the hards for a long run on a different fuel load. On his push laps Tsunoda chipped away from a 1m19.275s to 1m19.090s.
It isn’t possible to drill down into an exact comparison of the fastest laps set by both drivers owing to a data transmission issue which also affected F1 TV and the GPS signal to the teams. Mekies suggested that the GPS cutting in and out was a factor in the alleged impeding incident.
Arvid Lindblad, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Colin McMaster / LAT Images via Getty Images
Red Bull’s leaders are naturally being cagey about what their next moves might be in terms of driver choice for 2026, but Marko was explicit in dismissing F2 form as a reliable indicator of driver quality, saying FP1 evaluations now offer more of a steer. This is because the F2 picture has been disrupted by engine issues related to electrical problems and the new, sustainable fuel, as well as disqualifications caused by sensor failures.
“He [Lindblad] had, like [Isack] Hadjar last year, he was disqualified after one win, which was not his fault,” explained Marko.
“And you saw last year, [Andrea Kimi] Antonelli, [Oliver] Bearman, they also were not the frontrunners in the championship. This [FP1 running in an F1 car] shows the real potential.
“It was very clear and he never got excited, he was calm, and the technical feedback had profound influence. It was a very, how should I say, exact definition.”
Asked by Autosport what being quicker than Tsunoda might mean, Marko was positively gnomic: “That he is a talented young driver…”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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