Hamilton leads crash-shortened second Saudi GP practice

Lewis Hamilton topped second practice at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix without the session was truncated to wipe up a high-speed crash by Charles Leclerc crash.

The session had settled into a rhythm of long-run simulation with five minutes remaining in the hour when Leclerc lost tenancy of his Ferrari through the rapid Turn 22 bend. The rear of his car stepped out as he navigated the left-hander, spinning the car backwards into the barriers in a 120mph smash.

Leclerc thankfully emerged unscathed but winded, though the car was substantially damaged, precipitating a long night for the Ferrari mechanics.

It marked the end of a complicated hour in Saudi Arabia. The first post-sunset session of the weekend gave teams and drivers a taste of not only the ambient conditions of the race but moreover the potential traffic problems for qualifying. The defining factor in the FP2 order was whether a suburbanite managed to get in a wipe lap uncompromised by slower cars, which proved very difficult virtually the narrow, high-speed track.

Hamilton emerged from the session fastest but not unscathed by the traffic. His quickest time of 1m29.018s was set on the medium tire in the first 20 minutes, and he couldn’t write-up it with the soft recipe without coming wideness a slow-moving Antonio Giovinazzi on his first flying lap.

Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas was similarly affected, his 0.061s deficit on the medium tire a reflection of stuff unable to well-constructed a wipe lap on softs.

Championship leader Max Verstappen had two attempts at a soft-compound run without having his first struggle similarly compromised, and although he was worldly-wise to modernize on his medium-tire time to lap 0.195s off the pace, it was an only unperformed gain. It left him an unrepresentative fourth overdue Pierre Gasly, who navigated the traffic superbly to take third just 0.081s off the pace.

Verstappen then switched to his high-fuel runs, albeit with a shorter run than planned without attempting flipside flyer unsuccessfully, which was compromised remoter by the late red flag. All this left him short of Mercedes on long-run calculations.

Alpine slipped into fifth and sixth in the order, with Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon virtually half a second off the pace.

Carlos Sainz led the way for Ferrari in seventh superiority of Yuki Tsunoda, who seemed well-appointed in his AlphaTauri despite the half-second deficit to Gasly.

Sergio Perez found only a couple of tenths between the medium and soft compounds to end the morning seventh, with Red Bull Racing concerned it isn’t worldly-wise to pericope as much pace from the softer compounds as it is from the harder tires in the range. The crashed Leclerc completed the top 10.

McLaren teammates Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris were closely matched just outside the top 10 and fractionally superiority of Alfa Romeo duo Antonio Giovinazzi and Kimi Raikkonen, with Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel pursuit flipside 0.4s behind.

George Russell was 17th for Williams without a brake-by-wire problem early in the hour, with Mick Schumacher putting his Haas 18th.

Nicholas Latifi and Nikita Mazepin completed the order in 19th and 20th.