The British Grand Prix weekend got underway with a straight fight between Ferrari and McLaren.

The four drivers from the two most successful teams in the history of the sport, filled the first four places in both of today's free practice sessions. It was advantage Ferrari in FP1 with Lewis Hamilton (1'26"892) ahead of Lando Norris (1'26"915), Oscar Piastri (1'27"042) and Charles Leclerc (1'27"095). McLaren gained the upper hand in FP2 with Norris fastest (1'25"816), 222 thousandths quicker than Leclerc, 301 ahead of Hamilton and 470 quicker than Piastri.

Two drivers made their very first appearance at an official Formula 1 meeting: running in FP1 were the Estonian Paul Aron in a Sauber and the British driver Arvid Lindblad in the Red Bull.

Three teams opted to use a set of Hards right from today with both their drivers: Aston Martin and Williams in FP1 and Haas in FP2. However, most of the work, especially on long runs, was carried out on the Medium compound with just a few drivers doing some actual long runs on Softs.

Simone Berra: "Silverstone is one of the toughest tracks on the calendar as far as the tyres are concerned, not only because of the lateral forces to which they are subjected in the many high speed corners, but also in terms of wear. We got a taste of that in today's two hours of free practice, especially in the second session. What this means first and foremost is that a one-stop strategy, although possible, is rather marginal.

We saw that the performance delta between the Soft and the Medium is slightly bigger than our earlier simulations, stabilising around the half second mark. Graining made an appearance, especially on the Soft and Medium and we believe this could also be the case on Sunday during the race, given that temperatures are expected to be lower than today's."

Check out our Friday gallery from Silverstone here.