Verstappen leads FP2 from Leclerc and Norris

The defending champion and his nearest points challenger Leclerc will start the race at Spa from towards the back of the grid owing to penalties for engine component changes.

But the Red Bull driver appeared to have comfortably the upper hand ahead of the first round after the summer break as he was the only driver to break into the 1m45s lap times.

He headed Leclerc and McLaren’s Lando Norris, while a glory run for Aston Martin racer Lance Stroll bolted him to fourth ahead of Carlos Sainz and Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton.

For the second hour-long practice run of the weekend, Verstappen came to the fore in the middle 20-minute block during his qualifying simulation to set the session benchmark.

With FP1 pacesetter Sainz just having ran fastest round the 4.35-mile lap on soft tyres, Verstappen bolted to the top of the times on the same red-walled Pirelli rubber.

The Dutch driver posted a 1m45.507s flier to sit a mighty 0.0862s over Leclerc’s one-lap simulation, albeit with fuel loads and engine modes potentially masking the actual gap.

Leclerc’s session best of 1m46.369s sufficed for second ahead of Norris, Sainz and Hamilton, while soon-to-be-departing Alpine driver Fernando Alonso split the Mercedes pair in seventh.

It had also been Verstappen to set the pace in the first third of the session, with the Red Bull RB18 driver ending the opening gambit clear of Sainz by 0.5s courtesy of a 1m46.850s.

With damp patches initially, only Mick Schumacher and Daniel Ricciardo kicked off proceedings on softs as the rest of the grid were split between mediums and hards,

Only Norris had not ventured out after five minutes, by which time Sainz had set the first representative lap with a 1m48.818s before Verstappen cycled to the top on 1m47.699s.

With Sergio Perez climbing to third, the top three runners were on the medium compound.

Ricciardo, meanwhile, ran as the quickest soft-tyre driver in fourth as bar Hamilton in 10th, the hard runners George Russell, Sebastian Vettel, Valtteri Bottas and Nicholas Latifi propped up the order.

Leclerc was able to run fastest after missing the apex at Les Combes before Ferrari stablemate Sainz dropped to a 1m47.39s despite massively running wide through the gravel at the second part of the Les Fagnes chicane.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL36

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

This came as Verstappen tried to shed a tear-off that had become…