In a novel move, Red Bull will fulfil its rookie driver mandate by running two young drivers in the opening session in Abu Dhabi.

With just four races remaining, the bigger teams are finally, grudgingly having to give in to the rule and hand over precious running time to younger talents.

Yesterday saw five youngsters on duty in FP1, with Frederik Vesti replacing George Russell at Mercedes, Oliver Bearman replacing Magnussen at Haas, Theo Pourchaire replacing Valtteri Bottas at Alfa Romeo, Jack Doohan replacing Pierre Gasly at Alpine and Isack Hadjar replacing Yuki Tsunoda at AlphaTauri.

However, one team has yet to run a single rookie this year, world champions Red Bull.

Speaking on Friday however, team boss, Christian Horner revealed a unique response to the rule.

Asked about his team's lack of any rookie running thus far, the Briton told reporters: "We're planning to do that in Abu Dhabi, in the last standard race of the year and a circuit we've got quite a bit of data on.

"That first session in Abu Dhabi tends to have not a great deal of set-up value," he continued, "so that's where we're going to elect to put both rookie drivers in our cars.

"Jake Dennis is going to be driving one of the cars, and Isack will be in the other car," he revealed, "so it was good to see him put in a strong performance with AlphaTauri today."

"We were impressed by him," said AlphaTauri boss, Franz Tost of the French-Algerian driver. "He was calm, he went out with three different sets of tyres; prototype tyre, medium and soft, and with all these different compounds we saw that he really did a good job.

"His technical feedback was also quite good," he added, "because if you compare it to the data there's a very high correlation. We were really impressed and I think that he will be soon driving in Formula 1."

While the opening session is indeed pretty much irrelevant in terms of track conditions, as both qualifying and the race take place at night, a mistake by either driver could prove costly and impact the remainder of the weekend.

Then again, with Red Bull already on double Mercedes points haul and Max Verstappen's tally on its own enough to have secured the constructors' title, it's probably worth taking the risk.

Check out our Saturday gallery from Mexico City here.