F1: Ferrari dominate 2nd Practice for French GP

Carlos Sainz Jr, and Charles Leclerc dominated the 2nd practice session for the French GP at Paul Ricard as Ferrari clean sweep Friday running.

Sainz Jr. turned a lap of 1m32.527s on Pirelli soft tires to beat his Ferrari teammate by 0.010s.  However, if Sainz does win the pole on Saturday, will start no better than 11th as he has a 10-place grid penalty coming for engine component changes.

With overtaking possible here, this is a better race to start at the back from say, Hungary…

Max Verstappen got closest to the Ferrari, 0.550s behind in his Red Bull.

Verstappen isn’t too far away, really, especially since he didn’t seem overly happy with his set-up today. Nail that, and those few tenths should materialize.

But Perez was more of a concern in FP2, with a lengthy stay in the garage and just one flying lap on the softs.

George Russell and Lewis Hamilton rounded out the top-5, 0.764s and 0.990s behind respectively.  Russell that told that his team is seeing “quite high deg on Leclerc,” which is interesting, the Monegasque driver’s medium tires are only 11 laps old at that point.

As for Mercedes, they were up there albeit a few tenths off. Can they find that missing speed overnight or are they going to have to settle for being comfortably ahead of the midfield but well behind the front two in qualifying?

Lando Norris, running McLaren’s sizeable update, was sixth – one second off the pace – with his teammate Daniel Ricciardo half a second back in ninth. Between them was the heavily updated AlphaTauri of home favorite Pierre Gasly and the Haas of Kevin Magnussen, who made a big step in form from FP1 to FP2.

Red Bull’s Sergio Perez left it late to do his soft tire run, but it wasn’t spectacular, the Mexican slotting into 10th, a second behind his teammate Verstappen.

Fernando Alonso was the leading Alpine in 11th, his teammate Esteban Ocon competing in his home grand prix down in 18th, with Valtteri Bottas getting his first running of the day after Robert Kubica used his Alfa Romeo in FP1. The Finn was 12th.

Sebastian Vettel was the lead Aston Martin in 13th, ahead of Yuki Tsunoda – who was given the AlphaTauri update for the second session after initial data gathering on Gasly’s car in FP1 was deemed a success.

Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll was 15th, ahead of Williams’ Alex Albon and Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu.

There were no major incidents in the session but Mick Schumacher flat-spotted a set of medium tires when he ran wide at Turn 11 on the mediums and was 19th overall, as Nicholas Latifi running the updated Williams package for the first time, two races after Albon got it, propping up the timesheets.

There is one practice session still to come – that’s tomorrow. Then qualifying reverts to its normal Saturday afternoon slot, with pole looking like a straight fight between the two championship contenders – unless Mercedes manage to get involved.

Practice 2 Times