Mercedes & Red Bull to fight for the win? - What we've learned from Friday at COTA

After a cold and windy Friday at the Circuit of the Americas, which featured three hours' worth of practice ahead of Sunday's United States Grand Prix, there was a lot to unpack: here is what we've learned from today's running!

Ferrari to get pole position again

Looking at the running during FP2 in particular, Charles Leclerc had the fastest lap when teams were running their qualifying simulation. 

Well, he didn't Lewis Hamilton set the quickest time, but this time doesn't seem to be very realistic, with the Brit getting a big tow down the long back straight at COTA. This will have shaved several tenths off his time as his lap was three-tenths quicker than Leclerc in P2 and Max Verstappen in P3.

So ignoring Hamilton's lap, it was Verstappen and Leclerc who were quickest, with just 0.014 separating the two 22-year-olds. We think pole position will be taken by one of the two young stars, but Leclerc seems to have the upper hand, based on Friday's running.

...but their race pace isn't good enough

Race pace and one-lap pace are two different beasts. While Leclerc might have (sort of) posted the quickest lap, his pace over longer runs was several tenths behind Hamilton and Verstappen, with the Dutchman averaging 1:39.7's over almost 10 laps and Hamilton clocking in a tenth slower while Leclerc was averaging 1:40.2.

When Leclerc's race engineer communicated Hamilton's race pace over team radio, the Monegasque replied saying "no way I can do that!"

That says it all, doesn't it? Unless the Italian team have been sandbagging today, we don't expect them to be challenging for the win. Although getting track position by securing pole position could change this.

Turn 19 will cause problems

The penultimate corner seemed to be a really tough one for all 20 drivers. The stewards are very strict, much like they were at Monza at the end of Parabolica, deleting lap times if a car runs wide at the exit of the corner, which seemed to happen countless times. 

Alexander Albon looked to struggle the most with the track limits, with multiple lap times getting chalked off in both FP1 as well as FP2.

We can definitely see the corner causing drama during qualifying. Maybe someone has two purple sectors and then runs wide at turn 19 and gets their time deleted. Maybe someone gets a time penalty for exceeding track limits too often during the race. Something will happen there, though. We can feel it.