SPIELBERG, Austria – Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes struck back against the Red Bull squad by going fastest during Friday’s practice session for the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring.
Hamilton topped the charts with a time of 1:04.523, narrowly edging teammate Valtteri Bottas to set the fastest time of the day.
“Red Bull have definitely got something extra in their bag but we’ve made some small steps forward and over a single lap, the car felt pretty good,” said Hamilton. “FP1 was a bit of a struggle, we were trying different set up variations based on our work in the sim this week and the car wasn’t happy. In FP2, we reverted to a similar set up as last week, with a few other adjustments, and the car felt much better. I probably won’t change much now because most often if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! So just tiny tweaks for me this evening. I still expect Red Bull to be ahead of us, but we’ll be trying to make the gap as small as possible tomorrow.”
Championship leader Max Verstappen was third, .217 seconds off the pace set by Hamilton on Friday afternoon.
“From our side we didn’t have a perfect run in FP2 but nevertheless I felt good in the car and there are no real problems,” Verstappen said. “Mercedes looked quite quick on the soft so we just have to make sure we have a little more pace on that compound because we looked stronger on the medium and in the long runs, which at the end of the day is the most important for the race. We also tested the new Pirelli prototype tyre which seemed to be fine. It did get quite greasy out there but luckily it was good enough to keep on driving so we had a good read on the long run pace. I think it will be tight again this weekend as it looks like Mercedes improved a bit but we will see tomorrow in qualifying and the most important thing is to make sure we look after the softer compounds in the race.”
The Aston Martin duo of Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel found speed on Friday, going fourth and fifth fastest, respectively. AlphaTauri’s Yuki Tsunoda and Pierre Gasly were next in the overall practice results, followed by Alpine’s Fernando Alonso. Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. were ninth and 10th fastest overall based on their practice times from the first session of the day.