Sao Paulo, FP2: Ocon tops second practice at Interlagos

Alpine F1’s Esteban Ocon went quickest in the final practice session for the 2022 FIA Formula 1 São Paulo Grand Prix beating Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez by almost two tenths of a second as George Russell finished third.

With qualifying completed yesterday and all eyes on Saturday afternoon’s Sprint, the second hour of practice was a relatively quiet affair with longer runs and race preparation dominating proceedings.

Russell led the way for some time during the opening phase of the session with the Mercedes used soft tyres to post a lap of 1:15.115. He then lowered his own benchmark by two tenths of a second to sit half a second clear of Pérez, who was running on hard compound Pirelli tyres. But with little attention being paid to lap time the positions were not significant, with World Champion Max Verstappen down in twelth place for much of the opening phase.

Ocon then took on a set of soft tyres and he claimed top spot ahead of Russell with a lap time of 1:14.604. Hamilton climbed to third place on softs, lapping two tenths of a second off his teammate.

With 20 minutes remaining Pérez and Verstappen moved to scrubbed softs and Pérez took P2 while Verstappen went fourth to split the Mercedes. Alpine’s Fernando Alonso popped up with a lap of 1:15.409 to edge ahead of Verstappen.

That ended the improvements and with Verstappen fifth at the flag, sixth place went to Hamilton, with AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly seventh ahead of the Haas pairing of Mick Schumacher in P8 and Kevin Magnussen who scored the first pole position of his career on Friday. McLaren’s Lando Norris completed the top 10 ahead of Carlos Sainz as the Spanish driver’s Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc finished 13th.