Lewis Hamilton and George Russell sparked concerns in the Mercedes garage as they both reported the same car issue in practice in Baku.
The first Sprint weekend of the season means less practice time than usual for the engineers to gather the data they like to get ahead of a race. And a fresh change to the format means the Friday morning session is now the only hour of practice they will have for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
It is more imperative than ever, then, that FP1 is incident-free and does not present any problems for the teams. Sadly for Mercedes, their luck was out as, within minutes of the start of practice, Hamilton was on the radio with a concern.
"Brake pedal is very long, feels like passive," said the concerned Brit, before his race engineer replied to confirm the team was looking into the problem. He added: "I have no brakes at the moment."
Little over a minute later, Russell hit the airwaves with a similar concern. "Brakes feels pretty poor, not much deceleration," he reported, as Hamilton was called into the pit for the team to take a look at the problem.
To make matters worst, qualifying was not great for the Mercedes pair. Russell failed to get out of Q2 and will start Sunday's race 11th on the grid, while Hamilton only scraped through to Q3. He fared slightly better in that final part of the session, though, to go fifth fastest.
The Mercedes drivers were far from the only ones with problems in FP1, though. Yuki Tsunoda banged into the wall and destroyed his rear right tyre, limping back to the pits with the rear corner of his car dragging along the ground and causing significant damage to the floor of his car.
Meanwhile, Pierre Gasly had to bail out of his Alpine quickly as it caught fire. Marshals rushed quickly to put it out but the flames were persistent, and it took several minutes before the foam was eventually effective in extinguishing the blaze.
And, as the session was red flagged, Kevin Magnussen was forced to stop at turn one with an issue which meant his session was over after little more than 10 minutes. Haas chief Guenther Steiner said he was not yet sure what the problem was.
Even though who had not encountered a problem themselves were suffering, though. A red flag in practice does not mean the clock stops, and so every team was losing vital experimenting time ahead of an action-packed race weekend.
