Five drivers from five different teams in the top five places come the end of free practice for the Spanish Grand Prix.

So far this season, the field seems very evenly matched, or at least it has been since the Australian Grand Prix and that's been the case today, the longest day of the year. From the quickest time of 1'13"264 set by Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes to fifth placed Max Verstappen in the Red Bull (1'13"504) the gap is just 340 thousandths and in between these two we have Carlos Sainz (1'13"286) in the Ferrari, Lando Norris in the McLaren (1'13"319) and the Alpine of Pierre Gasly (1'13"443).

The two hours of free practice went off very smoothly, with just one brief interruption in FP1 because of a piece of front wing left on the track. The teams all worked on adapting their cars to the track characteristics and on tyre performance, using various fuel loads and different ways of managing the tyres, especially over long runs. The Hard compound was used a lot in the first session, especially at the beginning. By the end of the 60 minutes, only six drivers (Piastri, Sargeant, Albon, Zhou, Magnussen and Bearman) had not used the C1. In the second hour however, the Soft came to the fore, not only when it came to performance runs, but also over longer stints, which is what the teams worked on towards the end of the session. Even the longest run of the day - 19 laps courtesy of Yuki Tsunoda in the Racing Bulls - was done on the C3.

Simone Berra: "Barcelona always provides a stern test for all the parts that go to make up a Formula 1 car and the tyres are no exception to that rule! That was the case today, in high temperatures, with the track getting close to the 50 °C mark, which added further stress to the tyres that are already subjected to some of the highest lateral forces of the whole season. Honestly, we have not seen anything particularly surprising in terms of the performance of the three dry weather compounds, even if obviously we have not yet had a chance to study today's data in detail. The performance difference over a flying lap seems to match the predictions - six to seven tenths between Hard and Medium and just over a second between Medium and Soft - and the C3 appears to be a possible option for the race, especially in terms of exploiting its performance advantage off the start line and over the opening laps, as indeed we saw last year."

Check out our Friday gallery from Barcelona here.