Both Friday exercises were shortened to one hour each in 2021, instead of the usual 90 minutes. FP1 was crowned by Bottas and he repeated the feat in FP2 – but only by 0.01 seconds by teammate Lewis Hamilton. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen struggled when his driveshaft locked into place in FP2 while Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc hit the wall late.
What happened in Free Practice 1?
The session started with Red Bull’s Sergio Perez and Haas’s Nikita Mazepin suffering from early spins while AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda visited the Tamburello gravel trap after 15 minutes, from which he escaped but remained rooted at the end of time. The teams used most of the session to ride on hard tires. Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz was the leader on this rubber with a time of 1: 17.296 minutes – and Pierre Gasly’s second AlphaTauri was also at the top of the time.
The incidents continued when Verstappen suffered a gravel drop at the start of his second tough run while Hamilton selected the Alta variant for his trip off the track. The session was suspended 22 minutes from time when Alpine’s Esteban Ocon and Perez collided as they approached the Villeneuve chicane. Both cars were damaged, stranded on the track, causing a red flag.
After all teams lost more than 10 minutes of track time, they came out on soft tires, with Sainz dropping his P1 time to 1: 17.197 minutes.
Hamilton was the first driver on the 1:16 lap when Bottas got traffic on his first run on Softs and forced him to abandon the lap. However, he rearranged himself to set the fastest time of 1: 16.564 seconds and beat his teammate’s 1: 16.605 seconds. Verstappen finished third, 0.058 seconds behind the pace – all three took turns in P1 in the last moments of the session.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was fourth fastest, despite pitting for more than half the session while the team was investigating a problem. Gasly was fifth ahead of Sainz, Fernando Alonso (Alpine) and Lance Stroll (Aston Martin).
Latifi suffered a big moment in Rivazza, slipping through the gravel, but ending up in an impressive ninth place ahead of Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren. The session ended as it began when Mazepin turned – this time against the wall near the pit entrance.
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What happened in Free Practice 2?
In FP2, the middle tires were used by teams from the start. Leclerc went first, eager to make up for his lack of track time in the first session when he led an early Ferrari 1-2.
McLaren’s Lando Norris suffered a failure through the gravel in the first five minutes before Bottas and then Hamilton climbed to the top of the time and Bottas set the pace at 1: 15.551.
The main incident of FP2 occurred after just 10 minutes, when Verstappen came to a standstill at the end of the pit lane after a drive shaft failure when leaving Rivazza, which cost him valuable running time for the race simulation.
Leclerc was the first of the front runners to switch to the soft tire, but his P1 time of 1: 15.367 minutes was subtracted from exceeding the track limits in Piratella. On their soft-tyred runs, both Hamilton and Bottas were slower than expected and seemed to be struggling for rear grip – although Hamilton improved to get his teammate’s mid-fastest time within a hundredth of a second.
Gasly set the third fastest time ahead of Sainz. Leclerc and Perez came next from Tsunoda and Norris.
Mazepin had one more failure, a brief grassy moment in the Alta variant, but the session ended prematurely when Leclerc maneuvered into Rivazza and damaged his right front corner against the wall.
