Nikita Mazepin had a rather horrendous first practice session at the Austrian Grand Prix, and it wasn’t just subjected to his track position. The Russian also kept impeding several drivers on the track; Lewis Hamilton being one of them.

The Russian was on a cooldown lap and was doing quite a decent job, staying out of trouble. However, then arrived Hamilton from behind, who was on a hot lap.

The duo met around the tricky turn 3, with Mazepin having nowhere to go, and hence, drove straight off the track. Unfortunately, his reactions were too late, as Hamilton had already braked hard and locked up his tires going into the elevated turn.

Also, that unsurprisingly sabotaged Hamilton’s flying lap, preventing the Briton from finishing the session off on a firm note. Instead, the 7-time world champion managed a rather unsatisfactory P7 on the timesheets, closing out a struggle-induced session for Mercedes.

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Lucky for Mazepin, Hamilton stayed quite calm despite being obstructed by the Haas F1 driver. But of course, Kimi Raikkonen did not let it go as easy; the Finn ended up flipping the bird at Mazepin.

How Lewis Hamilton and Nikita Mazepin reacted to the incident

Mazepin did not hide his emotions after almost colliding into the Mercedes of Hamilton. “Fu*k man. That was close,” the Russian said.

Meanwhile, Hamilton was visibly dejected with the Haas driver, as he raised his hand at Mazepin with a huge disappointment. The Briton further said, “Man, I got damn traffic“.

Austria is quite a tough track to avoid such incidents, being a high-speed circuit. Hence, the only positive out of the Hamilton-Mazepin incident is that neither of them collided with each other.

Mazepin reacted a bit too late and almost clipped the Mercedes rear-left, but just managed to avoid causing an ugly collision.

Now, F1 is hours away from flagging off the second practice session in Austria. And the risk factor of drivers reciprocating such close calls is persistently high.

So, the biggest question is, will the drivers be as lucky through this weekend? Is there a bigger incident heading our way? Well, we’ll know soon enough.

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