Listen to this article Fernando Alonso was the first driver to head down a very dusty pitlane in Jeddah, where the opening one-hour session was taking place in sunny but very windy conditions. As Alonso pulled over to complete a practice start just as the pitlane exit light went green for the session’s start, Aston Martin pair Nico Hulkenberg and Lance Stroll therefore moved ahead and duly the set the initial quickest time a few minutes later. Hulkenberg’s 1m39.317s was quickly beaten by his teammate, then Pierre Gasly, Esteban Ocon, Sergio Perez, Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo, before Verstappen established the real early benchmark at 1m34.167s. Ahead of his timed lap, Verstappen had run deep and off the track at the final corner – the turn where the barrier has been moved back following his crash in qualifying there in 2021 – as did Alfa Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas and later Gasly and Lewis Hamilton, the latter pair with locked front right wheels. The early running took place with the field split across the hard and medium tyres, with the Mercedes cars coming out for the early laps on the softs. As the Red Bull drivers continued in their first runs, Perez improved to a 1m32.021s on the hards, before a few moments later Verstappen moved ahead again on a 1m31.885s using the same white-walled rubber. Verstappen improved again to a 1m30.888s as the opening 15-minutes ended, just after which the session was red-flagged after the 50m brake marker board for the first corner had come loose and fallen off the right-hand side barrier before being clipped by Lando Norris, which meant debris was strewn across the circuit. That took until nearly 25 minutes of …