Ocon leads pure long-run Free Practice 2

In a sprint weekend, you win many things and lose others.Qualifying on pole position on Friday afternoon brought excitement and surprises Kevin Magnussen, on a Friday that, in its normal form, the weekend would have passed without a fight or anything at stake. On the other hand, in this format, the Saturday morning free practice is the worst. It transitions from a free 3 search for performance to a turn,quality‘, to an hour long session that will allow the teams to arrive with more data for today’s sprint race (8:30pm / DAZN F1) and above all for Sunday’s race. In that context, Stephen Ocon Beating out the fastest time of 1 minute 14 seconds 604 Perez (second at 0″184) and George Russell (3rd) 0.312s, Fernando Alonso 4th with 0.445s Verstappen Almost half a second in 5th, Sainz in 11th. All cars mark their laps with their race pace in mind, so it’s a time that doesn’t represent the pure performance of the car.

With this weekend format (next year there will be six sprint race weekends) no modifications to the car’s setup will be allowed from qualifying on Friday, so the teams and drivers will be able to significantly improve their cars in this Saturday’s Free Practice 2. could not make any changes. The only thing they could do was analyze the tire performance on the as-is car in order to better choose the strategy to follow for Sunday’s race. It was a session full of long runs in various programs.

Sainz He did long runs on medium rubber, using this compound up to 28 laps, and two runs on soft, some up to 21 and others up to 6. Teammate Leclerc worked in reverse, starting with the soft and moving to the medium, analyzing the performance of both compounds at the same time on the track with both cars full of petrol.

I made a similar program Fernando Alonsoa first batch of soft stuff, up to 23 laps, and another batch of medium stuff, ending with the soft stuff used to run the final tests.

As for the rhythm, performance and time were almost even with soft rubber. red bull and ferrarithough I don’t know yet if those in red can keep up with the race pace Verstappen When the real fire started Milton Keynes They still have cars with less tire deterioration.

The first clear answer will be revealed by what happens in this Saturday’s sprint race. in her, Sainz He will start fifth to gain positions to minimize the loss of positions with the five penalties he will face on the grid on Sunday for having replaced the combustion chambers in his power unit. Leclerc also had to attack from 10th position. Ferrari In qualifying, like Fernando Alonso, who starts from 7th, we want to optimize our starting position this Sunday and secure a position for Saturday’s short race.