Lewis Hamilton stamped his authority over the rest of the field at Barcelona on Friday afternoon with commanding showings over both short and long runs.
The Briton finished more than four-tenths of a second clear of team mate Nico Rosberg as Mercedes lost little time in disabusing their rivals of any aspirations of matching their speed.
The silver cars set the pace whenever they were running fast on Pirelli’s hard compound tyre, and after Daniel Ricciardo had briefly moved ahead on his first run on the medium rubber, Hamilton and Rosberg replied on the same tyre with times that left the Red Bull trailing.
Hamilton’s best of 1m 25.524s was 0.449s faster than Rosberg’s 1m 25.973s, and a whopping 0.985s faster than Ricciardo’s 1m 26.509s. And just to rub it in, he was 1.597s quicker than fourth man Fernando Alonso’s 1m 27.121s. If there was meagre consolation for Ferrari, it was that Alonso’s team mate Kimi Raikkonen was back on form in fifth place with 1m 27.296s.
“FP2 – Hamilton and Mercedes take command in Spain”
Wow! What a surprise!
Z-z-z-z-z-z
… and Big John seems once again to be buried in the black abyss of nothingness, whilst his partner Maldonado appears to be making waves in the top ten rundown.
Other wierdo scenarios are Bottass & Perez (plus obviously Vettel).
It is looking increasingly likely that driver skill is critical to making theses cars work.
Under normal conditions, we would expect team mates to be close together…… yet this year, they can sometimes be separated by as much as a second!
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