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The first day ended with Kimi Antonelli setting the fastest time on the soft tyres in FP2. The Italian's best lap was a 1:10.763. Lando Norris finished in second place, around two and a half tenths of a second behind the Mercedes driver, and Max Verstappen completed the top three.

A week after Antonelli was crowned champion, Mercedes is ready to celebrate another title this weekend. If the German team manages to outscore Ferrari by three points on Sunday, it will also clinch the 2026 World Constructors' Championship. However, it is not a straightforward weekend for Mercedes, as George Russell will receive a five-place grid penalty for the race after taking on a new internal combustion engine.

The Italian outfit had a difficult first day at the Sao Paulo circuit. Speaking after FP2, Leclerc said:"It's been a very difficult Friday. The feeling was just very poor inside the car, so we've got a lot of work to do and probably more than other weekends. We need to changed quite a lot of the car from today to tomorrow. It just felt quite strange in a way. So, yeah, lots of changes to be made."

He continued: "We were losing for sure on the straights, but I think the car, in terms of the corners, just felt probably one of the worst Friday feeling of the season. So I think there's a lot to be found in the corners, more than in the straights where we know we have a deficit. But, normally, we are very fast in corners, and today that was not the case.

I don't have the answer yet. I've got quite a lot of ideas on what to change, and I think there will be significant changes going into tomorrow. Whether that will be enough, the issues we had today was quite big, but there's no reason why we would struggle so much more on a track like this, so we need to find a solution," Leclerc explained.