Round 11 of the 2025 FIA Formula 1 World Championship began with Friday practice at the Red Bull Ring, Spielberg as teams prepared for Sunday's 71-lap Austrian Grand Prix.

MoneyGram Haas F1 Team drivers Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman opening their FP1 accounts with a baseline stint on the Pirelli P Zero Yellow medium tires - completing 13 and 12-lap runs respectively. A switch to the Red soft rubber followed with Ocon posting a 1:06.510 for P19 and Bearman a 1:06.738 for P20. Returning to their earlier medium sets, both drivers rounded out the 60-minute session completing high-fuel runs to the checkered flag.

FP2 later in the day continued to see track improvements with Ocon and Bearman climbing the timesheet as the performance in the VF-25 picked up. Having started the late-afternoon session on the medium tire, quali sims were next on the run program with both Ocon and Bearman setting their fastest laps on the soft compound. Ocon banked a 1:05.698 for P15 with Bearman in P18 on a 1:05.835 lap. Friday's track action concluded with more high-fuel running around the 4.318-kilometer (2.683-mile), 10-turn circuit.

MoneyGram Haas F1 Team ran a total of 127 laps on Friday across FP1 and FP2 - 65 by Bearman with 62 from Ocon.

Ollie Bearman: "It's been a bit of a tough day, struggling for pace. It's very close on a track like this with a very short lap, so we definitely have some work to do tonight. All on my side, I wasn't really driving as I should be, so a bit of work to do. Our high-speed performance was lacking slightly so that's our main target to improve tomorrow. Alarm bells aren't ringing yet as our trend recently has been to be better on Saturday than Friday, and we made a step from FP1, so let's hope that continues."

Esteban Ocon: "It's only practice today - we'll see tomorrow - and usually our race pace is better than our quali pace. It's all heading in the right direction, we're improving the car step-by-step most importantly, and I feel like we've picked up a decent amount of performance from FP1 to FP2. We need to make another step tomorrow as the field is extremely tight all the way through, it's just going to be even tighter here as there's only 10 corners."

Ayao Komatsu, Team Principal: "It seems that every Friday we struggle to find the sweet spot of getting the car and driver in sync. Today's been a similar story, but FP2 was better than FP1, but we need to look at a few points overnight to improve the car. We can see enough potential there, but to deliver in qualifying we need to pay attention to some details and I'm sure we can do it, I just wish we could start Friday more competitively. The good thing is that we've been here before where we've been slower on Friday and we know how to improve the car. On long runs - similar to Montreal, we show we have a good race car, so our main focus is to fine-tune everything so we can qualify in a good position to be able to fight for points."

Check out our Friday gallery from Zeltweg here.