SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, Belgium — Max Verstappen set the pace during practice for Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix, but crashed before the end of the session.
The Red Bull Racing driver covered the famed Spa-Francorchamps Circuit in 1 minute and 44.472 seconds to edge Mercedes driver by a mere .041 seconds.
However, Verstappen brought the session to an end when he backed his Red Bull RB16B into the wall at the Malmedy corner.
“I think we definitely had a positive start today but unfortunately I just lost the rear at the end of the second session, there was a bit too much oversteer to correct, and I hit the wall,” Verstappen explained. “As a team we were quite happy with how everything was going and we did some fine tuning between FP1 and FP2. Looking ahead to tomorrow, there are of course things to take into consideration including the weather but it’s difficult to say what the track is going to be like in the wet.”
and score a lot of points for the Team for the rest of this season and of course next year.”
Bottas, who led the first session turned the second quickest lap of the session.
“Everything felt pretty good out there today,” Bottas said. “As we saw from the timesheets, it’s going to be very close with Red Bull once again so we’ll look into the detail tonight and see what marginal gains we can find. The pace on both the short and the long runs was pretty decent. It’s always tricky to compare in detail from the practice sessions, but at least the feeling is good, so that is a positive start to the weekend.”
Bottas’ Mercedes teammate, Lewis Hamilton was third on the speed charts.
Fernando Alonso was fourth for Alpine Renault, with Pierre Gasly fifth for Alphatauri Honda.