Bottas and Hamilton top FP1 for Mercedes in Mexico City

Mercedes drivers Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton topped the opening practice session for the Mexico City GP, the pair leading their Red Bull counterparts Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez.

Bottas edged Hamilton by just 0.076s, while Verstappen was 0.123s adrift from the Finn. Perez suffered an off early in FP1 that led to a rear wing replacement that deprived the Mexican of half a session's worth of track time.

• 2021 Mexico City GP Free Practice 1 - Results

The Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez opened its gates to F1 fans for the first time since 2019, and judging by the healthy influx, the local crowd has dearly missed Mexico City's showcase event.

All eyes were predictably on the 'aficionados' local hero, one Sergio Perez, who took to the track in a thunder of applauds that likely reverberated into the Red Bull driver's cockpit.

But the Mexican was off to a rocky start, suffering an off after five laps on the incredibly dusty track at the exit of the stadium section, a clumsy mishap that occurred just after Ferrari's Charles Leclerc had spun at the same corner.

Both drivers headed back to the pits in short order, with their crews springing into action to replace the rear wing on both cars.

However, it would prove a costly setback for the Mexican as the damage extended to several other rear components on the RB16B, and the repair job sidelined Perez for the first half of the session.

It was evidently not the start to his home race weekend that Checo was hoping for, to say the least.

In the interim, AlphaTauri's Pierre Gasly positioned himself at the head of the field, leading Bottas and Verstappen with a benchmark lap of 1m20.316s.

But as the track surface progressively cleaned up, times improved, and Hamilton, Verstappen, Tsunoda and Bottas moved ahead.

In the wake of a brief burst to the top from Ferrari's Carlos Sainz, the main protagonists, all running on the soft tyre, pressed on, with Verstappen taking the lead with a 1m18.464s flyer that edged Bottas by 0.370, with Hamilton, Gasly and Sainz following.

But Bottas then went quickest, lowering the benchmark to 1m18.341s that put himself 0.123s clear of Verstappen.

Meanwhile, Perez was back on track, much to the crowd's exhilarating pleasure, and managed to slot himself into P4, just ahead of Gasly.

With ten minutes left on the clock, Hamilton moved up to second, 0.076s adrift of Bottas, while Leclerc progressed to P7 after his rear-wing repair earlier in the day.

In the closing stages of the session, Verstappen reverted to the hard tyre, signaling that the Red Bull driver was done with his performance runs.

The session thus concluded with Mercedes drawing first blood versus Red Bull although it's certainly too earlier to extract any relevant information from the opening running.

Behind the Merc/Red Bull leading quarter, Gasly and Sainz rounded off the top five, with Fernando Alonso was the fastets of the two Alpines, preceding Leclerc, teammate Esteban Ocon and Sebastian Vettel who closed out the top ten.

Further back, McLaren enjoyed an anonymous FP1, with Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris lining up respectively P14 and P15, while the Haas duo of Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin were the usual suspects bookending the field.

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