Mercedes champion driver Lewis Hamilton finished the opening ninety minutes of free practice at the Monza circuit on Friday at the top of the timesheets with his teammate, Valtteri Bottas close behind in P2.
However, the second session saw a switch around at the top of the order with Lewis closing out the day in a very close second place.
“It's been a good day, a clean day,” Lewis said. “We got the running done, we got through our programme with no problems. The car seems nicely balanced here. We just have some work to do to eke out a little bit more performance. It looks quite close between us and the Ferraris, so I anticipate it's going to be similar to the last race in that sense.”
The Silver Arrows were the only cars to finish FP1 in under 1:22 with Lewis over a second faster than the Ferraris in P3 and P4 In FP2, the four fastest cars finished within half a second of each other
Despite the rain that was forecast, it stayed dry for most of the practice sessions.
“First of all it was nice that it stayed dry today because all the forecasts said that the rain could affect the running and we could have limited running before qualifying and the race in the dry,' added Bottas. “But we got our full plan done. In FP1 we were actually ahead of the plan because we were still worried about the weather.”
“I think it was a good day - at least I have a better feeling than I had after the Friday in Spa, everything started on the right foot. Initially in FP1 we went slightly in the wrong direction with the setup, but we managed to change it around for FP2 and the car felt a lot better. Overall, it was a positive day, the car is looking strong, but obviously it's the next two days that count.”
