Mercedes dominate opening session at Suzuka! - FP1 summary & results

In the first practice session at Suzuka in Japan on Friday, Mercedes has shown their great pace early-on as they secured both first and second place, with Lewis Hamilton edging out his teammate Valtteri Bottas.

In the McLaren garage, Lando Norris climbed back into the MCL33 for another run in an F1 car, something which he will be doing on a weekly basis from next year onwards. However, his runs weren't representative of his actual pace, as he only ran on the hardest compound available, the medium compound. This is largely why the British teenager finished bottom of the timetable.

Even though Red Bull set the pace early-on in their C-spec engine, which they have scooped back into the RB14 after going back to the B-spec in Russia, it was all about Mercedes afterwards.

Bottas led the tables with the first sub-90-second time, leading Sebastian Vettel in second and Hamilton in third. Hamilton was on mediums though, making it that much more impressive that he was less than two tenths off his teammate, who was on supersoft tyres.

Behind the Mercedes cars it was Daniel Ricciardo, who out-paced Max Verstappen by quite a bit for a change.

Apart from the hot laps, there was also plenty of drama to be had.

Hamilton almost had a very scary collision with Pierre Gasly, as the latter was driving on the race line with very low speed. If not for Hamilton's cat-like reflexes, that could've been a bad ending. An investigation was opened to see if Gasly should be penalized in some way, but nothing came out of that (yet).

The moist track also gave us two spins; first Sergio Pérez, then Fernando Alonso, who was lucky to avoid the barriers on his one. We don't know if that was skill or luck, but the Spaniard will claim he avoided that himself; we're not so sure!