Alonso outpaces Red Bull duo to top second F1 practice

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was fourth in a session where the top 13 drivers finished within one second of each other, the Mercedes drivers were locked in the pack and Nico Hulkenberg produced a starring effort for Haas.

With the temperatures down 5C to 22C in the evening running under lights, several teams immediately headed out on the soft tyres they had eschewed in the hot FP1 running earlier on Friday afternoon.

This included Alpine, with Esteban Ocon using the softs to pop in a 1m32.415s that demoted Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll, who had set the first-place benchmark at 1m33.624s on the mediums a few moments earlier.

The Ferrari drivers then flashed through to close out the one-hour session’s first five minutes with their first runs on the softs – Sainz shooting into first place with a 1m31.843s before Leclerc surged ahead on a 1m31.843s, gaining time on his team-mate during the second half of the lap.

Leclerc’s time stood as the quickest for 20 minutes, the subsequent featuring several close calls between drivers as Perez had to jink left and avoid Leclerc’s rear when coming across the Ferrari at the Turn 8, downhill hairpin, while McLaren’s Oscar Piastri had a pair of the lock-ups at Turn 1.

The first came after Piastri had tried to outdrag Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri down the main straight before they came upon Stroll going slowly ahead of the right-hand hairpin in the middle of the track, with the McLaren diving right but snatching his right front brake as he did so.

A few moments later, Piastri went off at the same spot having caught the flat spot on this right front tyre sustained in the first incident, which resulted in McLaren bringing him in for fresh rubber.

The second round of performance runs kicked off approaching the 25-minute mark, with Carlos Sainz getting closer to Leclerc’s leading time but failing to better it before Stroll appeared for the first time on the softs.

He nipped ahead of the Ferraris with a 1m31.450s before being shuffled down a few moments later by Haas’s Hulkenberg, who produced a 1m31.376s.

But that only lasted as the benchmark for a few moments as Perez shot into first place with Red Bull’s first run on the softs, the Mexican driver setting a 1m31.078s that Leclerc could not match, his second softs flier coming in 0.289s to Perez.

But both were shuffled back, first by Alonso, who popped in a 1m30.907s that stood as the leading time to the end of the session.

Then came Verstappen, who was of…