Rain started sporadically falling in the paddock with under an hour to go ahead of FP2’s 3pm local time commencement, but this intensified with 15 minutes to go.
It was therefore no shock when no cars headed out as FP2 did get under way, with few drivers even in their cockpits at this stage.
After 12 minutes, Lewis Hamilton did venture out on the mediums, declaring the track “pretty dry”, but he was called back into the pits the next time by after Mercedes spotted what Hamilton’s race engineer Peter Bonnington called “rain indicators in sector one”, which stopped the Briton putting a time on the board.
As Hamilton was heading in, Daniel Ricciardo was out exploring, but with the rain Mercedes had seen getting even heavier, the RB driver was soon back in the pits after a sole tour on the mediums.
A 10-minute absence of action then commenced before Oscar Piastri took his McLaren out on the intermediates – his car sending spray upwards from the track surface, which had not been happening during the earlier excursions of Hamilton and Ricciardo.
Piastri said it was “not really that wet”, but he nevertheless was brought back in immediately, just as Zhou Guanyu, Valtteri Bottas, Yuki Tsunoda and Ricciardo were also sampling the inters for the first time as the session’s second half kicked off.
Source: Autosport