Valtteri Bottas led a comfortable Mercedes one-two in first practice for the United States Grand Prix at Austin's Circuit of The Americas, almost a second ahead of Max Verstappen. The Finn’s fastest time of 1m34.874s was 0.045s quicker than Lewis Hamilton’s best effort and a substantial 0.932s faster than Max Verstappen’s quickest lap. Bottas’s lap was built on a particularly impressive second sector, comprising Turns 7 to 12 and the long back straight. He gained half a second on Verstappen through that sector alone, and his 0.2s advantage over Hamilton through the middle split was enough to offset slower times in over the balance of the track. But the session-topping performance...
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