Hamilton denies Verstappen top spot in Imola practice

Lewis Hamilton was fastest as Formula 1 began its return to Imola with Emilia Romagna Grand Prix practice, but Max Verstappen kept Mercedes on its toes.

Verstappen and Red Bull dominated the top of the timesheets in the first half hour of the weekend’s sole practice session on Saturday morning with a string of ever-more-rapid laps on hard tyres.

It took a move to mediums for Mercedes to initially get ahead by just over a tenth of a second with Valtteri Bottas 27 minutes in, with Verstappen then retaking the top spot 10 minutes later on softs.

Hamilton got to within 0.008s of Verstappen’s time using mediums shortly afterwards, before the top teams all had a spell focusing on soft tyres and full-on qualifying simulations.

Initially this produced a Verstappen-Hamilton-Bottas order in which the Red Bull was fastest by two tenths.

But Hamilton had a successful second flying lap on the same set of tyres a few minutes later and put in the 1m14.726s that stood as the session’s best by 0.297s over Verstappen and 0.492s over Bottas.

The leading three were a second clear of the rest for most of the session, while a large pack behind was generally covered by just a few tenths – and regularly shuffled by lap deletions for track limits infringements at Piratella and the Variante Alta.

Pierre Gasly, rapid throughout the morning at AlphaTauri’s home track, ended up at the head of that group in fourth, with Charles Leclerc putting Ferrari in front of the Renaults of Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon in fifth right at the end.

The second Red Bull of Alex Albon was down in ninth between Daniil Kvyat’s AlphaTauri and the Racing Points.

A lap deletion meant Sebastian Vettel was last for a long spell, but he did haul himself up to 12th in the end.

It was Nicholas Latifi who ultimately ended up slowest, having sat out much of the session with a problem on his Williams’s braking system.

The track proved as challenging as expected, but there were no major incidents.

Though Kvyat explored the Tamburello gravel early on, Carlos Sainz Jr went off on the way out of Rivazza 2 and Kevin Magnussen went over the Variante Alta grass they were all able to continue.

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