Slater drove Gabriel Bortoleto’s R26 in the first hour of practice at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Friday, October 30, becoming the first graduate of the Audi Driver Development Programme to pilot a Formula 1 car at a Grand Prix weekend.
The first run barely began before it ended. A cooling fan had been left inside the sidepod of the R26, and the car was released onto the track with it still attached. By the time the team called Slater back to the pits, his session had already been cut in half.
Audi was fined €7,500 by the FIA after the stewards investigated the unsafe release, the same figure Mercedes received for a comparable incident at the Australian Grand Prix earlier in the year. The penalty fell on the team alone; Slater received no sporting sanction.
He eventually got back out for a handful of laps and finished at the bottom of the timesheets.
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‘The car feels very weird’
Slater had completed just one private test in an F1 car before Mexico. The jump from Formula 3 was steeper than any simulator could replicate, particularly at 2,240 metres above sea level.
“Definitely an outlier, the car feels very weird,” he told Motorsport Week after the session. “Obviously not a lot of aero load because of the altitudes, but also with these cars, with how the battery works, the amount of boost that you get off the corner is incredible.”
He described the jump up the single-seater ladder in similar terms.
“A big step from F3 cars, so yeah it’s pretty intense, but I really enjoyed those couple of laps that I got.”
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‘We win as a team and we lose as a team’
The teenager refused to let the fan incident dominate his verdict on the day.
“Yeah, for sure [it’s frustrating], but at the end of the day, it’s motorsport, and that’s how things go,” he said. “We’re a team and we win as a team and we lose as a team, so of course it was a bit frustrating obviously not to get many, many laps.”
Slater added that the one representative lap he managed was “actually pretty good compared to relevant data,” and framed the outing in bigger terms than a timesheet result.
“A really historic day for Audi to have their first junior driver in the car. It’s a very special day, so we look at the positives and then we focus on the results.”
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São Paulo FP1 next
The Mexico FP1 was the first of two race-weekend outings Audi has lined up for Slater this triple-header. He is due to drive again in FP1 at the São Paulo Grand Prix on Friday, November 6, taking over Nico Hülkenberg’s R26 at Interlagos.
Slater finished runner-up in this year’s Formula 3 championship with Trident and will step up to Formula 2 with Invicta Racing for 2027 as the first driver signed to the Audi programme set up under racing director Allan McNish.
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