As Motorsport.com Italia reports, Andrea Kimi Antonelli endured a bittersweet opening day of free practice at Baku, where promising pace was heavily compromised by mechanical gremlins. The trouble struck midway through FP1 when a hydraulic system failure forced the Italian to park his car beside the track. The cascading system failures prompted marshals to use an extinguisher to prevent a potential fire, a chemical intervention that the engine unfortunately does not digest well.
That chemical contact left the team facing a nervous wait. Precautionary checks meant Mercedes opted to swap the power unit between sessions, discarding the brand-new engine that had been slated for Friday running. In its place went a previously used unit from the pool, meaning no grid penalties were incurred.
"The car is back in the garage, I think, 15 minutes after the end of the session, and was ready to hit the track just as the red flag came out in FP2. The mechanics did a crazy job to replace the engine, take the old one out and put the new one in. No penalties, because it's one already present in the pool," explained Mercedes Vice-Team Principal Bradley Lord.
The damaged power unit will now undergo deeper analysis. The core goal is saving that engine for the remainder of the season, which would spare Antonelli from taking another penalty before the year is out. While Kimi is already over the limit with the internal combustion engine, he still has a turbo and MGU-K unit available before hitting penalties, though the team is doing everything possible to avoid further sanctions.
Despite missing nearly an entire session's worth of running across FP1 and FP2, the underlying signs were encouraging. Antonelli felt comfortable inside the cockpit on the Baku streets and managed strong lap times, backed by a machine that appeared to boast a clear advantage in battery management and energy deployment compared to rivals.
That efficiency allowed Mercedes to excel in both the middle sector and the final straight without having to sacrifice one for the other. Much of Antonelli's deficit to teammate George Russell stemmed purely from the lost mileage in the technical direction changes of the second sector, where finding the absolute limit requires laps he simply did not get to run.
"It was a compromised day because, with the problems we had, we lost a lot of laps in FP1 and half of FP2, so never ideal. But, overall, with the laps I did I felt quite good in the car and the feeling was good, even if obviously there is a lot of work to do ahead of tomorrow," Antonelli stated.
