Sainz leads Ferrari one-two in final practice session before sprint race · RaceFans

Carlos Sainz Jnr led Ferrari team mate Charles Leclerc in the second and final practice session for the Austrian Grand Prix.

The Ferrari pair used soft tyres to sit top of the time sheets in the busy second practice session, with Sainz ending the session quickest overall by exactly five-hundredths of a second over his team mate. Sprint race pole winner Max Verstappen ended the session third fastest, having set his best time of the hour on medium tyres.

Although the skies were filled with clouds after a sunny start to the weekend of Friday, air and track temperatures were virtually identical to qualifying when the teams took to the track for the final practice session of the weekend.

Prior to the start of practice, Mercedes announced that they had swapped Lewis Hamilton to a spare chassis following his crash in qualifying on Friday and that they did not expect to get their cars out onto the circuit until around half an hour into running. However, Hamilton’s team mate George Russell was released out onto the track after only a short delay once the track had gone green at the start of the session.

Teams opted for a mixture of medium and soft tyres as they focused on long runs ahead of the evening’s sprint race. The Ferraris of Sainz and Leclerc went to the top of the times on the medium tyres with Sainz setting the benchmark of a 1’09.515, before Max Verstappen headed out on the soft tyres to set the fastest time, almost half a second quicker than the Ferraris.

Leclerc came over the radio to question if there were any problems with his power unit after sensing he may not have been getting optimum power from his car, however, he was reassured it was simply his engine mode setting and Leclerc was able to continue on his run uninterrupted. Both Verstappen and Sainz improved their times, while Russell moved third on the soft tyres with a 1’09.240, a quarter of a second off Verstappen’s best.

After spending almost half of the session in the garage, Alpine eventually sent Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon out onto the circuit, with Alonso going fourth fastest on the medium tyre. Verstappen then switched over to the mediums and used them to improve his own overall fastest time by just over the tenth of a second, before Alonso moved up into second place behind the sprint race pole winner. Ocon then replaced his team mate as the second ranked driver, setting a personal best time that was only half a tenth slower than Verstappen’s best.

Just after the half-hour…