Montréal, FP2: Hamilton continues to set the pace in Canada

After topping the morning session at Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Lewis Hamilton doubled up in second free practice in Canada, beating Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel to top spot by 0.25s.

Hamilton’s best time, on the ultrasoft compound Pirelli tyres, was a 1:14.212, almost two tenths of a second up on his pole position time of 2015.

Vettel pressed the defending champion hard though. In the opening session the German was half a second adrift of his Mercedes rivals but on ultrasofts Vettel powered to a lap of 1:14.469 to get to within three tenths of a second of Hamilton.

Nico Rosberg was third quickest for Mercedes but he ended the session over a hald a second behind his team-mate. Behind the Mercedes and the quickest Ferrari, fourth and fifth places went to Red Bull Racing, with Max Verstappen ahead of Daniel Ricciardo by one hundredth of a second. However, while the gap between the team-mates was slight, they were almost a full second off the pace of Hamilton’s P1 time.

Sixth place went to Valtteri Bottas, with the Williams driver setting a time of 1:15.213, a time exactly matched by McLaren’s Jenson Button, who took seventh owing to setting his time after Bottas.

Button’s time came after a troubled morning session in which he turned just eight laps due to a power unit issue. The Briton made a delayed entry to the action after his power unit was changed but once on track he made the most of the new engine to match Bottas and to outpace Ferrari’s eighth-placed Kimi Raikkonen by 0.021s.

Nico Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz completed the top ten ahead of Fernando Alonso, Sergio Perez and Felipe Massa. Massa managed 44 laps in the second session having crashed out in FP1.