Free practice
Free practice sessions are the untimed-for-position running before qualifying, used to set the car up and learn the tyres.
Also called fp1, fp2, fp3, practice
A standard weekend has three; a sprint weekend has one. Nothing about finishing order carries any reward, which is why the timing screens can be misleading — cars run at different fuel loads and on different tyres for their own reasons.
Teams divide the time deliberately: early running on setup changes, then a qualifying simulation on low fuel, then a long run to measure race pace. The long run is usually the more informative of the two.