Piastri tops FP2 as wet track curtails running

Rain started sporadically falling in the paddock with under an hour to go ahead of FP2’s 3pm local time commencement, but this intensified with 15 minutes to go.

It was therefore no shock when no cars headed out as FP2 did get underway, with few drivers even in their cockpits at this stage.

After 12 minutes, Lewis Hamilton did venture out on the mediums, declaring the track “pretty dry”, but he was called back into the pits the next time by after Mercedes spotted what Hamilton’s race engineer Peter Bonnington called “rain indicators in sector one”, which stopped the Briton putting a time on the board.

As Hamilton was heading in, Daniel Ricciardo was out exploring, but with the rain Mercedes had seen getting even heavier, the RB driver was soon back in the pits after a sole tour on the mediums.

A 10-minute absence of action then commenced before Oscar Piastri took his McLaren out on the intermediates – his car sending spray upwards from the track surface, which had not been happening during the earlier excursions of Hamilton and Ricciardo.

Piastri said it was “not really that wet”, but he nevertheless was brought back in immediately, just as Zhou Guanyu, Valtteri Bottas, Yuki Tsunoda and Ricciardo were also sampling the inters for the first time as the session’s second half kicked off.

Only the RB pair stayed out for longer than a single out/in lap, with Tsunoda duly taking his inters to the initial first place benchmark with a 1m42.304s and Ricciardo slotting in behind him 4.1s adrift.

After each had completed a cool-down tour, the RB drivers pushed again and Tsunoda improved to a 1m40.946s, with Ricciardo’s second effort closing him to 0.9s off his team-mate’s new leading time.

With just a third of the one-hour running remaining the RBs pitted, but still few others were willing to join the fray – the consensus that the conditions were really too dry for the inters but too wet for slicks.

Zhou and Bottas at least reappeared on the inters, but again only for single out/in laps aboard their Saubers.

Another lull in action that lasted nearly 10 minutes then occurred, before Zhou again headed out in the inters, yet again for just single tours.

As the final 10 minutes of the session began, Alex Albon and the Haas drivers Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hulkenberg emerged on the slicks, but only Hulkenberg attempted a flying lap.

Yet he abandoned that and so it was left to Piastri, who had also come out late on the slicks, to…