Hamilton leads a Mercedes 1-2 as Sainz crashes in second free practice at the Italian Grand Prix

Lewis Hamilton topped the time charts at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza circuit in Italy in the second free practice session (FP2) on Saturday.

Valtteri Bottas was 0.222 seconds behind in second position. Max Verstappen in third position was 0.416 seconds behind Hamilton at the end of the session.

The second free practice session took place on Saturday morning as this is the second race at which the Sprint Race on Saturday evening is going to determine the starting grid of the race.

The qualifying session took place on Friday and Bottas, Hamilton and Verstappen finished in the top three positions.

The sixty-minute long free practice session started again under clear skies with the air temperature at 25 degrees C and the track temperature at 37 degrees C.

This race weekend has only two practice sessions and the drivers had to use the sixty minutes to prepare for the sprint race and do the race simulations.

The Pirelli tyre choice at this race is the white-striped hard compound tyres (C2), yellow-striped medium compound tyres (C3), and red-striped soft compound tyres (C4).

The two Uralkali Haas F1 Team drivers were the first drivers to set a timed lap with Nikita Mazepin topping the time charts.

Sergio Pérez on the soft compound tyres with a quick lap time of 1m24.870s went to the top of the time charts. Verstappen soon displaced his team-mate and went quicker with each lap and had a gap of 0.436 seconds to Pérez.

Hamilton was on the soft compound tyres and Bottas was on the hard compound tyres doing their race simulations. Bottas will start the race at the back of the grid after penalties for new power unit components.

Carlos Sainz suffered a heavy crash at the Ascari chicane and the session was red-flagged with less than thirty minutes of the session left. The Ferrari mechanics have a lot of work to do repairing Sainz’s car before the Sprint race.

After the session restarted, Robert Kubica, Esteban Ocon and Antonio Giovinazzi moved into the top 5 positions. Hamilton then went to the top of the time charts, half a second quicker than Verstappen, with a lap time of 1m23.246s. Bottas was in second position 0.222 seconds slower.

Hamilton switched to the hard compound tyres and Verstappen to the medium compound tyres for the long runs. All the teams and drivers were on different programmes in the shortened session.

The session ended with the two Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team drivers, Hamilton and Bottas, at the top of the time charts. Verstappen and Pérez were in third and fourth positions.

Ocon was in fifth position with team-mate Fernando Alonso in eighth position. The Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN team drivers, Kubica and Giovinazzi, were in sixth and seventh positions.

Pierre Gasly and Lando Norris in ninth and tenth positions rounded off the top ten positions.

The two Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team drivers, Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel languished in seventeenth and eighteenth positions.

The teams will prepare for the all-important Sprint race which will determine pole position for the race. The tyre choices between the soft and medium compound tyres will be made for the Sprint race based on data gathered in this session.

2021 Italian GP Free Practice 2 Results: