Practice Two - McLaren take their turn at the front 07 Sep 2007
After a curious hour and a half of running this afternoon, in which most teams seemed to settle for race preparation running rather than super-fast times, McLaren’s Fernando Alonso set the day’s quickest lap with 1m 22.386s. That proved to be 0.823s faster than the next man, his team mate Lewis Hamilton.
The Ferraris, which had run in the mid 1m 22s this morning, were down in sixth and eighth places, with Felipe Massa leading Kimi Raikkonen.
Alonso set his time early on, just before Anthony Davidson’s Super Aguri stopped out on the circuit on the exit to Turn Six and brought out the red flag for 12 minutes while the stricken SA07 was carted away. Subsequently, Hamilton lowered his time to 1m 23.209s, clearly running, as were Ferrari, to a different strategy.
Giancarlo Fisichella was third for Renault on 1m 23.584s, ahead of the BMW Sauber of Robert Kubica and Nico Rosberg’s Williams, with 1m 23.599s and 1m 23.679s apiece. Massa had an adventurous afternoon, with a spin in Turn Five right in front of Hamilton, and a couple of other moments that suggested he had not optimised the Ferrari’s set-up in race trim.
He lapped in 1m 23.722s, ahead of Nick Heidfeld’s BMW Sauber on 1m 23.821s and Raikkonen’s Ferrari on 1m 23.833s. Right behind the Finn were fellow countryman Heikki Kovalainen for Renault (1m 23.848s) and Williams’ Alex Wurz (1m 23.881s). Just outside the top ten came the Toyotas of Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher (1m 23.919s and 1m 23.922s respectively).
This time Jenson Button was only 13th in his Honda, which he lapped in 1m 24.137s. Team mate Rubens Barrichello was 15th on 1m 24.462s, sandwiched between Red Bull pilots Mark Webber and David Coulthard on 1m 24.328s and 1m 24.605s.
Takuma Sato was 17th for Super Aguri on 1m 25.328s, ahead of Sebastian Vettel in the quicker Toro Rosso on 1m 25.459s. Adrian Sutil put his modified Spyker ahead of Tonio Liuzzi’s STR02 with 1m 25.531s against 1m 25.567s, the Italian having found his handling ‘weird’ in the morning practice session. Spyker’s Sakon Yamamoto was 21st on 1m 25.863s, and Davidson’s 1m 26.021s lap left him 22nd and last.
