Bottas and Hamilton keep Mercedes in the lead in FP2

Max Verstappen, who drives a new Honda engine and will start the race in Sochi from the end of the grid, finished sixth behind Pierre Gasly, Lando Norris and Esteban Ocon.

While discussions continued between F1, FIA and the teams about the impact of the expected heavy rain on Saturday, the majority of the pack immediately took to the track as the hour-long session began to make the most of what was likely to be the last dry land run before sunday.

Daniel Ricciardo was the only exception as the Australian missed the first third of the session as McLaren was working on converting his car’s engine to a previously used one after discovering an issue with the engine that he saw during his lunch break at FP1 had driven.

Kimi Raikkonen drove for the first time in the session – 1: 37.019 minutes on the medium-sized tires – before he was soon dropped by Pierre Gasly and Carlos Sainz, who also drove on the yellow-walled surface.

Charles Leclerc then used the soft tires to be the fastest at the end of the first five minutes. The Ferrari driver beat his team-mate with 1: 35.508 minutes.

Valtteri Bottas, who also ran the medium, then took the lead with 1: 35.298 minutes before Leclerc came back to the top with 1: 34.925 seconds while his run on the softs continued.

After 15 minutes, when most of the field was back in the pits, Fernando Alonso used the softs to drive the fastest with 1: 34.762 minutes.

After 20 minutes had passed, Verstappen and the two Mercedes vehicles began simulating qualifying, with Bottas leading the trio.

His 1: 33.593 minutes put him back in first place, while Verstappen was 1.028 seconds behind the pace of the Finn.

Hamilton, who knocked over the Mercedes front jack when it returned to the pits after its early run, and the W11 exceeded its targets as it was still activated by the world champion with its “magical” brake preload change system when it was braking, when he entered the pit lane it was the last of the trio to attempt a flight on soft tires.

He was a tenth ahead of Bottas in the first sector, where he set the fastest time of the session, but lost time to his teammates in the remaining two thirds of the lap – Bottas and Alonso finished FP2 with the fastest times in second and third place Sectors – and ended up 0.044 seconds behind.

Shortly thereafter, Leclerc half spun his SF21 out of high-speed turn 8 after placing his right wheels on the AstroTurf strip behind the curbs at the exit of the turn, but he was able to collect himself and continue driving without an issue – Sergio Perez gave way to that Ferrari when he arrived on stage a moment later in his Red Bull.

The session was in the second half of the traditional FP2 long-term data collection exercise when the process was interrupted by the Giovinazzi crash.

The Italian had a very similar slip as Leclerc in the same corner, but spun backwards at high speed and crashed into the guardrails after the run-out corner at Turn 8, destroying the rear of his car.

Giovinazzi began driving away from the incident but was told by Alfa to stop because he “lost parts” and because the barriers he had encountered needed to be rearranged as well, the session was therefore abandoned.

It resumed after a 10 minute delay and long term efforts resumed as Verstappen complained about the top speed of his FP2 setup and Hamilton at one point slid along the raised “sausage” curb as he exited Turn 10 on the right on the meandering back “straight ahead” after having carried too much speed into the right-hand bend.

After completing the qualifying simulations, Gasly pushed himself in front of Norris and was 0.252 seconds behind Bottas’ best time.

But the AlphaTauri driver’s session ended dramatically when his front wing broke off after he had jumped hard over the Wurstrand in the final minutes of Ricciardo at the second vertex of Turn 2 and the Frenchman had to slowly drive back into the pits.

While Ocon finished fifth with his best time on the softs before Verstappen, Sainz finished seventh, while Alonso was relegated to eighth place.

Sebastian Vettel finished ninth and Leclerc completed the top 10 ahead of Perez and Raikkonen, who at one point during the red flag reported that he was still feeling uncomfortable because he got something in his eye during FP1.

Ricciardo drove the fewest laps of all drivers due to his late start in FP2, the Monza winner ended up in 17th place ahead of Yuki Tsunoda and the Haas duo.