Oscar Piastri topped FP2 at Formula 1's Japanese Grand Prix as four red flags effectively halved the session and obscured our view of the Red Bull driver swap everyone is keeping such a close eye on this weekend.
McLaren's Piastri narrowly pipped team-mate Lando Norris by 0.049s on the soft tyre runs in a troublesome session where well over 37 minutes was lost through various incidents.
Piastri’s 1m28.114s is better than Max Verstappen’s pole lap set last year, showing the expected increase in speeds.
Red flag mayhem
Alpine’s Doohan was taking his first laps in an F1 car at Suzuka after missing FP1 while the team gave Ryo Hirakawa some running - and he was impressively ahead of team-mate Pierre Gasly in that session.
After just four laps and just over seven minutes, Doohan lost the car on the entry to Turn 1 at high speed which left Doohan asking what happened on the radio. Onboard images failed to reveal a clear reason for the crash.
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— The Race (@wearetherace) April 4, 2025
Doohan did get out of the car unassisted - albeit with a hand around his waist from a doctor and a marshal on each side - after the high-speed crash, which means he’ll only have FP3 on Saturday to acclimatise to the car and circuit before qualifying.
It required some significant barrier repairs with the session resuming halfway through the original 60-minute window, but green flag action lasted only four minutes as Fernando Alonso then brought out a red flag.
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— The Race (@wearetherace) April 4, 2025
Alonso dipped his wheel on the grass into the first Degner corner and ended up backwards and stuck in the gravel between the two corners on the exit. “I’m stuck,” he said, and asked the team to look into some “bouncing” on the entry.
The green flag left just over 20 minutes in the session, forcing some urgency, particularly from Mercedes' George Russell who overtook Lewis Hamilton and then took to the grass on the pitexit to try and overtake Verstappen in a bid to push on and get as many laps as possible in.
It was Russell who set the first benchmark after the stoppage but times quickly tumbled, before a fire on the grass between Dunlop and Degner 1 forced another red flag with 14 minutes to go, seemingly caused by sparks from the bottoming-out F1 cars being blown onto the grass.
Another fire as the session clock ticked to zero pointed to a worrying problem that could plague the weekend if the weather doesn't change significantly.
Behind the McLarens, Lewis Hamilton in fourth split the RBs, with Russell in sixth ahead of Leclerc. Verstappen was eighth ahead of Gasly and Carlos Sainz rounded out the top 10 after an early complaint for the Williams "bouncing like crazy".
What we learned from Red Bull driver swap
With such truncated running - over 37 minutes of the session lost to red flags - taking any major insight from Yuki Tsunoda at Red Bull or Liam Lawson at RB was tough.
Especially as Red Bull's Tsunoda was on an out lap and just starting a fast lap when the third red flag emerged, while Verstappen had already got his soft-tyre run in.
With just over seven minutes remaining when the green flag emerged, Tsunoda didn’t bother trying a soft tyre run and will seemingly save that for FP3 as he got some medium running in.
Verstappen was eighth and 0.556s behind the fastest time, and lamented “understeer everywhere” as the RBs were ahead of the Red Bulls. Tsunoda was 18th and 2.511s off without a representative effort.
In the RB intra-team fight, Isack Hadjar appeared to have the edge over Lawson, albeit by less than a tenth of a second as the two drivers appeared well-matched on the soft tyre runs.
In FP1, Tsunoda had impressed being just over a tenth off Verstappen, while Lawson was over three tenths off Hadjar in that session.
Edd Straw on Tsunoda's session
He set his best time on his first flier, with the second flier on that first run on mediums not counting as the red flag came out moments before he crossed the line.
The only other full laps he completed after that were in the final brief run when he was running on heavy fuel. However, he did say early on that he felt the balance was good, describing the car as "a bit more stable than FP1".
FP2 results
1 Oscar Piastri (McLaren)
2 Lando Norris (McLaren)
3 Isack Hadjar (Racing Bulls)
4 Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari)
5 Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls)
6 George Russell (Mercedes)
7 Charles Leclerc (Ferrari)
8 Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
9 Pierre Gasly (Alpine)
10 Carlos Sainz (Williams)
11 Alex Albon (Williams)
12 Nico Hulkenberg (Sauber)
13 Gabriel Bortoleto (Sauber)
14 Esteban Ocon (Haas)
15 Ollie Bearman (Haas)
16 Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes)
17 Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin)
18 Yuki Tsunoda (Red Bull)
19 Lance Stroll (Aston Martin)
20 Jack Doohan (Alpine)
