Charles Leclerc took fourth for Ferrari but ended up even further back from the dominant Mercedes pair, complaining about understeer aboard his F1-75.
As the one-hour session commenced, Valtteri Bottas led the pack out of the pits – the Alfa Romeo running the medium tyres for the initial laps – and he duly set the first-place benchmark at 1m21.462s.
A few minutes later, Hamilton was the first of the frontrunners to emerge – his Mercedes fitted with softs from off, as was the case for all his rivals.
Hamilton’s opening effort moved him into first place, although he had to beat Bottas’s second flying lap of his opening run that had brought the best time down to a 1m21.041s.
With a 1m20.505s, Hamilton moved ahead, but only for a few seconds as Leclerc, looking to make up for his costly FP2 crash, was following closely behind a going quicker.
Leclerc’s opening effort moved him into first on a 1m20.487s, which stood as the best time until the end of the first 10 minutes when Sainz slotted in ahead to break the 1m20s bracket on 1m19.884s.
After Perez put in Red Bull’s first-soft flier, Russell produced a smooth opening effort to shoot to the top of the times on a 1m19.405s.
After Mick Schumacher had spun off after hitting the kerbs too hard at Turn 10 – as Verstappen did in FP1 – and briefly come to a tyre-smoking stop in the run-off behind Turn 11, Verstappen emerged as the session’s opening third was about to end.
As is so often the case with the world champion in practice sessions, he immediately went fastest with a 1m19.296s, but was unhappy with his handling over the kerbs at the first corners, as his RB18 had snapped left with oversteer exiting Turn 3.
After a few cool-down laps and a trip through the pits, Verstappen completed his second flier on the softs, benefitting from a tow from Perez down the main straight, possibly foreshadowing tactics Red Bull will deploy in qualifying at a venue where that strategy badly backfired in 2021.
Verstappen roared to a purple sector one and then although he lost a touch of time in the middle sector, he had enough tyre life left to improve the top time to a 1m19.118s.
The flurry of fast times ended through the middle part of the session, where the Ferrari drivers – by this stage down to fourth and fifth in the standings – each completed a high-fuel race-data-gathering run on the softs.
Just before the start of the final third, Russell rumbled back to the top spot with a…
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