Rosberg tops 2nd USGP practice

Vettel 4th for Ferrari but a huge 8/10ths off the pace

F1 point leader Nico Rosberg put his Mercedes on top of the charts early in the 2nd practice session for the USGP at Austin and there it stayed through the rest of the session. Rosberg's lap of 1m37.358s was 2/10ths of a second faster than the rest.

Closest to Rosberg was Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull followed by Rosberg's Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton in 3rd 3/10ths behind Rosberg.

Sebastian Vettel was 4th for Ferrari and Max Verstappen rounded out the top-5.

The Force Indias of Nico Hulkenberg and Sergio Perez were sixth and seventh respectively, followed by the McLarens of Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso. Kimi Raikkonen in the second Ferrari completed the top ten.

The Anti-American Haas team embarrassed themselves in front of the home crowd with Grosjean only 18th and Gutierrez 20th out of 22 drivers. American fans do not cheer for losers so having an American team in F1 at the back of the grid will do nothing for F1 popularity in the USA.

Nico Rosberg
The running of the car was different between P1 and P2 because of the temperature; it was very cold when we ran this morning. The weather also had a bearing on the balance of the car as it altered as a consequence of the changing wind direction around the track. It should be different tomorrow because the weather is going to change again, as it does frequently here in Austin, and it means what we learn today might not necessarily help us for Saturday.

Nico Rosberg

Lewis Hamilton
This circuit remains special for me as I won my third World Championship here last year. It's great to see so many fans enjoying F1 in the US and coming out to show their support. On track it's been a great day for reliability and getting our program done. Given the wet weather conditions here last year and the lack of reference points for each tire compound Nico and I had to cover as much ground as possible to help with our understanding. We've still got to go away and analyse the data overnight to make sure we're ready for P3 and qualifying tomorrow.

Paddy Lowe, Executive Director (Technical)
It's great to be back in Austin with some fantastic sunny weather. It's been a good day and we've managed to get through our program without any issues. We've taken a look at all three tires during the course of the day and tried to close off as many open questions as possible as there are still a lot of options on the qualifying and race strategy. During the afternoon session long runs Lewis tried the medium compound tire whilst Nico explored the soft and both ran the super soft tire. We've lots of work to do tonight still and it looks like it could be pretty close between the three top teams. We need to get everything right if we're going to have a good weekend.

Daniel Ricciardo
I’m happy with today. This morning was solid and the long run pace was good. We made a few changes in between the two sessions and look pretty good for now so hopefully we’ll stay like that. On our long run pace we look like we’re able to match Mercedes, possibly quicker, so if we get the pace we had today against Mercedes on Sunday it’s going to be a fun race. It is only Friday though so let’s see what they’re doing tomorrow but it’s nice to start the weekend on the right foot. I don’t think we’ve got hours and hours of work ahead of us. Just a little bit of fine tuning as always but we don’t have to search for too much at the moment.

Max Verstappen
We tried some different setups from FP1 and FP2 to try and find a strong feeling with the car. In the end we found a good one for the long runs on soft tyres but we still need to improve the short run pace. I’m quite confident we can do that tomorrow. We got some good data from the short runs but struggled to find a clean lap. We changed the setup during FP2 in order to improve some issues, which is why my car was worked on for a while. The supersoft seemed to lose grip every lap and get slower, so I think for the race it will be interesting. The long run pace seemed good, I had a Ferrari in front of me and I was catching it so I think that is a positive sign.

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