Hamilton leads Bottas in FP2, Ricciardo third for Renault

Reigning Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton led Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas in second practice for the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix at Silverstone, with Daniel Ricciardo third for Renault.

Hamilton, who won last weekend’s British Grand Prix at the same track, set the fastest lap of the session on the medium tyre – which seemingly emerged as a credible alternative to the soft for qualifying.

Pirelli has brought a softer tyre range to the second Silverstone weekend, with the British GP’s soft tyre – the C3 – becoming the medium, and the C4 joining the range as the new soft at the wear-intensive venue.

Fresh off a 15-point deduction as a result of Renault’s protest, Racing Point took an early 1-2 in the second practice session on softs – but moments after Lance Stroll cleared Nico Hulkenberg by 0.003s, Bottas went over a second clear of both.

The Finn’s initial 1m25.917s effort on mediums stood as the best of the weekend so far, and was only beaten by 0.006s by team-mate Hamilton’s first try on softs.

Neither W11 would improve on their first runs, but only Red Bull’s Max Verstappen managed to get within a second of the Mercedes duo by the half-hour mark, after which the Silver Arrows emerged with swapped compounds.

And while Bottas improved on the soft, he did so by just a couple of tenths – and Hamilton’s medium effort proved faster still, a 1m25.606s proving sufficient to top the session, with the second half of the running predictably made up mostly of high-fuel long runs.

Renault driver Ricciardo left his qualifying simulation relatively late and put together a soft-tyre lap good enough for third place, albeit 0.815s down on Hamilton. His team-mate Ocon ended up only 10th, half a second slower than Ricciardo.

“Okay, we’ll just to the same in 24 hours,” Ricciardo radioed in when informed of his position on the timing screens.

Verstappen’s flying lap on softs came even later than Ricciardo’s, but only yielded a modest half-tenth improvement compared to the Dutchman’s previous medium-tyre attempt, and left him 0.016s down on Ricciardo.

Stroll was a close fifth and a quarter of a second up on Hulkenberg, with both logging their fastest efforts on the medium.

Hulkenberg, who continues as stand-in for Sergio Perez following the Racing Point regular’s second positive COVID-19 test, reported a potential loose seat towards the end of the session – and eventually came in with 12 minutes left on the clock when it got “properly loose”.

Charles Leclerc again led the way for Ferrari in seventh, just under four-tenths up on 14th-placed Sebastian Vettel.

Vettel would report “a big failure at the back of the car” with seven minutes to go, and pulled over to the side of the track exiting Copse, causing a brief virtual safety car period as fluid poured out of his SF1000.

Ferrari confirmed at the end of the session that the problem was an engine failure.

Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz Jr rounded out the top nine for McLaren, with Ocon a hundredth behind Sainz.

Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate Alex Albon had a compromised first flying lap on the soft, and though he did subsequently improve on used tyres he ended up only 11th, ahead of the AlphaTauri pairing of Daniil Kvyat and Pierre Gasly.

The Haas, Williams and Alfa Romeo cars made up the bottom six of the order.

Shortly after Vettel’s failure, another Ferrari-powered car in Antonio Giovinazzi’s Alfa Romeo pulled over off track at the Maggots and Becketts section, triggering a red flag that brought a slightly premature end to FP2.

Practice 2 Results