Valtteri Bottas clocked in fastest in Friday's opening practice for this weekend's Russian Grand prix at Sochi, the Mercedes driver comfortably leading Renault's Daniel Ricciardo and Red Bull's Max Verstappen.
It was a lively opening session disrupted by the deployment of several yellow flags and a red flag sparked by Williams' Nicholas Latifi, while Lewis Hamilton concluded the morning well down the order after flat-spotting his tyres early in the session.
Sochi opened up to the action on Friday under sunny skies and ambient temperatures of 27°C that encouraged everyone to hit the track at the outset when the lights went green, supported by a few thousand fans in the grand stands!
As a reminder, Pirelli is supplying its three softest compounds this weekend - the C3, C4 and C5 - that match Sochi's ultra-smooth asphalt.
Installation and exploratory laps were the norm, as usual, in the opening 15 minutes of the session, but Bottas eventually put the first time on the board. But the early benchmark was quickly beaten by Racing Point's Sergio Perez who was himself overhauled by local hero Dany Kvyat.
After 30 minutes of running, Verstappen sprung to the top with a 1m36.751s, but a run on softs allowed Bottas to reclaim the top spot just before McLaren's Carlos Sainz suffered an off at Turn 7, the Spaniard damaging his rear wing and forced to idle back to the pits.
The action resumed after a short interruption to clear some debris, with Bottas leading Esteban Ocon, Perez and Verstappen.
But shortly before the 60-minute mark, the red flag was deployed after an over-ambitious Nicholas Latifi slid into the wall at Turn 10, damaging the left-hand side of the Williams.
The green flag set everyone loose once again, with 30 minutes left on the clock, prompting Verstappen to move up to second, 0.654s behind Bottas.
But Ricciardo then pipped the Dutchman for the runner-up spot although the Aussie's time was still over half a second off Bottas' best.
The Finn thus upheld his title of fastest FP1 driver of the year for the sixth race running.
Meanwhile, teammate Lewis Hamilton was conspicuously absent from the top ten, the Briton lingering down the order after flat-spotting a set of hard tyres early on working through his morning set-up program thereafter.
Racing Point chargers Perez and Stroll rounded off the top five while Ocon, Kvyat, Albon, Vettel and Gasly completed the first half of the field.
Leclerc followed in P11, edging McLaren boys Sainz and Norris, with the former only completing 8 laps following his mishap earlier in the session.
As usual, the rear was brought up by Alfa Romeo's, Haas' and Williams' contenders, with Hamilton sitting an unremarkable P19 just ahead of Latifi.
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