Crawford steals Yas Marina spotlight as Norris clocks Pirelli’s future

Two days after the fireworks of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix faded over Yas Island, the howl of F1 engines rose again. This time there were no trophies, no points – just a long, hard day’s work in the desert heat, where Aston Martin rookie Jak Crawford topped the post-season test as new world champion Lando Norris slipped back into his McLaren to help Pirelli map out the sport’s future.

The single day of running at Yas Marina, from 09:00 to 18:00 local time, doubled as both Pirelli’s 2026 tyre test and the traditional Young Driver Test, with 25 drivers cycling through the pitlane. As Formula1.com and Pirelli outlined, each team fielded two cars: a 2025-spec machine in standard trim for a rookie on current tyres, and a heavily tweaked ‘mule car’ for at least one race driver, trimmed to mimic the lower-downforce 2026 regulations and shod with next‑generation rubber.

In that hybrid playground of present and future, it was Crawford who wrote his name at the top of the timing screens. The American, runner-up in the 2025 Formula 2 season, unleashed a 1:23.766 for Aston Martin in the final hours, according to Formula1.com and Crash.net, edging Paul Aron by just +0.081s with Williams junior Luke Browning third. RacingNews365 noted that reserves locked out the top five, with Frederik Vesti and Ayumu Iwasa completing a rookie‑heavy leaderboard that underscored how hungry the next wave already is.

Behind them, the mule‑car runners quietly got on with the job that will matter most next March. Crash.net reported that Vesti logged a marathon 145 laps for Mercedes while team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli completed a day‑high 157 tours, emerging as the quickest of the drivers in modified 2025 cars. AutoHebdo and Pirelli detailed how those machines, running narrower 18‑inch tyres and aero tweaks, were trimmed to slash downforce towards 2026 levels, giving engineers priceless data on how the new compounds behave when the grip bleeds away.

“It was more difficult for teams to estimate the performance of their 2026 cars at the end of the season… But we needed those simulations because we needed to design a product that is lasting for one year.”

— Mario Isola, Pirelli’s motorsport director, speaking to Motorsport.com about the challenge of preparing the 2026 tyre range

For Norris, this was less a coronation than a reset. Fresh from sealing his first world title on Sunday, the Briton returned to action in Abu Dhabi with a shimmering gold helmet, sharing McLaren’s Pirelli duties with Oscar Piastri while IndyCar star Pato O’Ward handled the young‑driver running. Formula1.com recorded Norris’s best lap at 1:26.142, with Crash.net adding that he completed 71 laps in the morning – solid, methodical mileage rather than headline‑grabbing speed as he helped McLaren and Pirelli probe the new rubber’s limits.

By the time the floodlights flickered off, the numbers told a clear story. Crawford had taken unofficial "pole" for the day, Aston Martin’s green flashing first on the screens. Norris, Hamilton, Leclerc and the rest sat clustered in the midfield, their focus not on glory but on grip levels, degradation curves and brake‑zone balance. As RacingNews365 framed it, this was the final on‑track act of 2025 – a nine‑hour rehearsal for a radical 2026. On a quiet Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, F1’s present and future shared the same strip of asphalt, and it was a 20‑year‑old American and a freshly crowned champion who bookended the story.