Montmelo, 9 May – Mercedes, Red Bull, Scuderia Ferrari: could this represent the pecking order down pit lane for the weekend? It’s not an unlikely scenario and it’s the one suggested by this afternoon’s time sheet, after the 90 minutes of Free Practice 2. The winner of the past three races. Lewis Hamilton, appears to be in a state of grace right now, quickest in both sessions and almost half a second faster than Mercedes team-mate and championship leader Nico Rosberg. Daniel Ricciardo was third quickest, the only driver to fly the Red Bull flag at the Catalunya circuit this afternoon, as Sebastian Vettel had a wiring loom problem this morning that could not be fixed in time for FP2.
Then came Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen in fourth and fifth, the Spaniard almost 1.6 seconds down on Hamilton’s time, with the Finn just under two tenths slower than his team-mate, so pretty evenly matched today for the two Prancing Horse drivers. Rounding off the top six was Kevin Magnussen in the McLaren.
With three weeks between the last round in Shanghai and Formula 1’s European debut here in Spain, the garages were the scene of frantic activity over the whole length of pit lane, as all teams had some new updates to try, which involves not only doing plenty of laps, but also plenty of swapping over of components in order to run comparison tests. The stopwatch says the engineers still need to find a bit more pace from the F14 T prior to tomorrow’s qualifying and the race, but the number of laps run today -108 between the two cars – shows the day went well and produced plenty of data.