Alonso tops Friday afternoon’s practice session

Fernando Alonso concluded the opening day of the Canadian GP on top.

The Ferrari driver set the fastest time of an afternoon session marred by incidents – most notably crashes for Sutil, Kobayashi and d’Ambrosio.

He was three tenths of a second faster than Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel, who bounced back well from his morning’s crash. Massa was third fastest ahead of Hamilton and Button. Di Resta and Webber completed a top six covered by 0.9s.

The big news before the session even started was Pedro de la Rosa replacing Sergio Pérez at the wheel of his Sauber. The Mexican didn’t feel well after this morning’s practice and preferred to sit out the rest of the weekend.

The Spaniard, who is McLaren’s reserve driver, completed fourteen laps and set the 18th fastest time.

How the session unfolded :

Work immediately resumed and, only ten minutes in the session, 20 drivers had already posted a time on the board. The ones missing were Vettel, Hamilton, Button and de la Rosa.

The World Champion quickly got up to speed as he tried to make up for the time lost this morning after he crashed in the final chicane. His second timed lap saw him move on top of the timesheet, 0.3s ahead of his teammate Mark Webber.

He further improved to be the first to dip under the 1’16 bracket. After fifteen minutes, he was leading from Webber, Hamilton, Alonso, Heidfeld and Massa. The top six drivers were covered by 1.4s.

Hamilton then split the Red Bull pair, 0.2s behind Vettel… but the German found more pace to go 0.5s quicker than the McLaren driver. As Vettel, Hamilton and Webber pitted, Button moved up to third place.

Things then quietened and, with just over an hour remaining, most of the cars were back in the pits. After a short break, the party resumed. Massa and Alonso jumped in the top three, slotting behind Vettel.

Alonso then edged out Vettel by 0.2s. The midway point of the session saw some teams taking on the super soft tyres. They helped Barrichello to break into the top ten. Sutil was on a flying lap when he went wide and hit the wall in the second sector. He damaged the front left suspension of his Force India and had to pull out.

The session was red-flagged not long after that, as Kobayashi hit the wall on the way out of Turn 4. The front-end and right side of his Sauber were quite badly damaged.

The track reopened ten minutes later. Most of the cars filtered through the pitlane as drivers were keen to complete some laps on the super soft tyre. Their hopes were short-lived though as Jérôme d’Ambrosio crashed his Virgin out of Turn 4 and brought the red flags out.

Lewis Hamilton appeared to have picked up a puncture from the debris and slowly made his way back into the pits.

The session soon resumed. Paul di Resta managed to improve and moved up to P6. Most of the frontrunners seemed to concentrate on heavy-fuel runs and were quite far off Alonso’s benchmark.