Practice 3 Report - Russell goes to the top

George Russell
© Mercedes

George Russell put Mercedes and himself in contention for pole position as the British driver set the fastest time in the last practice session for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, after a terribly disrupted Friday, with Power Unit and sensor issues.

Russell didn’t have the best start of FP3 either, with traffic ruining his run on the first set of Soft tyres but managed to put a clean lap together in the final minutes to beat favorite Charles Leclerc by just 0.013s and claim the top spot.

This time it was Lewis Hamilton who couldn’t put a good lap together, with traffic, red flags and a mistake in Turn 3 hampering his progress, the veteran unhappy with the balance of his car and opting to pit with two minutes to go to start his debrief as quickly as possible.

The session suffered two interruptions, in line with what’s normal in street circuits. Esteban Ocon’s horrible weekend continued as a Power Unit issue forced him to stop after Turn 16 as he was about to start his first flying lap of the day, the Frenchman missing his second session in three possibilities and heading into qualifying completely on the back foot.

After a nine minutes delay practice resumed until Oliver Bearman hit the tech-pro barrier in Turn 1, causing the second interruption of running. The youngster realised quite late he wasn’t going to make the corner and tried to bail out into the wide run off area but ran out of space and ended up damaging the left front corner of his Haas.

That left all other drivers with just 22 minutes to run through two sets of Soft tyres and do their qualifying simulations, but plenty of yellow flags and traffic allowed very few to do clean laps. In that exercise it was Russell who did the better job claiming the fastest time, but Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bill were all within 0.35s with Mercedes, leaving things wide open as we head into qualifying.

Leclerc and Piastri were extremely quick in the first sector, all 90 degree corners with heavy braking and requiring good traction, but Verstappen was the fastest in this second, faster sector, showing that in the high speed corners the RB20 is the most efficient car around this track. But Verstappen and Pérez were losing over 0.3s to their rivals in the final sector - Turn 16 and the pits straight - even with the Mexican giving a bit of a tow to his team mate on the final lap. That indicates Red Bull is running a higher downforca package than its rivals, which will help with tyre degradation in the race but will leave them vulnerable in direct battles.

Ferrari was, as expected, very competitive especially with Charles Leclerc, while Sainz continued to show this is one of his least favorite tracks and was down in P6, right behind Verstappen, but more than 0.4s slower than his team mate. And at Red Bull there was the return of the status quo, as Pérez was almost 0.2s slower than Verstappen and down in P7 after shining on Friday.

With Hamilton in 10th, Williams was the surprise package of the session, as Albon and rookie sensation Franco Colapinto were marginally quicker than the seven times World Champion, putting James Vowles’ team in prime position to get both cars in Q3 later today. The two Aston Martin were not far off, with Alonso in P11 and Stroll two places behind, split by the much more encouraged Yuki Tsunoda, who had another clear session on his way to 12th place.

Ricciardo was 14th quickest ahead of Pierre Gasly, the Frenchman showing that even with clean running Alpine is not competitive around this track, while Haas dropped pace and Hulkenberg was only 16th, marginally ahead of Bottas. Zhou was the slowest of the 18 runners and will have to start the race from the back of the grid, a penalty for exceeding his season allocation of Energy Stores and Electronic Control units this weekend.