George tops the timings on Friday in Mexico despite limited running.

As part of the young driver session allocation, Nyck De Vries replaced George for the opening session of the weekend in the W13.

The Brit returned for FP2, beginning the session on the Medium tyres to put in a benchmark 1.23.375.

Switching to the Soft tyres after 20 minutes, George jumped to the top of the timings with his best time of 1.19.970 before returning to the pits.

A crash for Charles Leclerc brought out a lengthy red flag after the Ferrari made contact with the barrier.

With 37 minutes remaining, the green light shone, and the session resumed with George switching to the Pirelli test tyres for the remainder of FP2 to end the day in P1.

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George Russell – Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One™ Team Driver

Today was one of our better Fridays, if not the best of the year so far - the car is working well and it felt good driving on this track. The pace was relatively strong, but we know the challenges at this circuit. For qualifying, the difficulty will be to get the tyres in the right window for the single lap run. And on Sunday, it will be difficult to manage temperatures for the engine and for the brakes. A podium finish should hopefully be possible for us this weekend, so that's what we will be aiming for. Not having the normal FP2 running, where we get to assess the long run performance of our rivals, doesn't allow us to understand where our competitors are and that can become a big challenge if we will struggle with tyre temperatures during the race. We take some very useful learnings about tyre temperature management for next year and will be working hard overnight as it's not going to be a straightforward weekend for sure, but positive learnings for us today.