Colapinto ends Friday in Barcelona: 15th in FP2, ahead of Gasly again | OneFootball

With the aim of evaluating the performance of his Alpine A526 for both qualifying and the Barcelona Grand Prix, Franco Colapinto completed the second free practice session at the Montmeló circuit. The Argentine driver finished 15th on the timesheets after posting a lap of 1m17.051s as his best effort among the 30 laps he completed on the 4,657-meter Catalan track.

During the 60-minute session, Colapinto used four sets of medium tires and two sets of softs, setting his fastest lap with the latter. The runs allowed the Pilar-born driver to assess tire wear under different fuel loads, providing key data for Alpine’s engineers as they analyze strategy ahead of qualifying and Sunday’s race (the seventh round of the championship).

Once again ahead of Gasly

Just like in Friday’s first session (where he had surprised many by breaking into the Top 10), Colapinto was once again quicker than his teammate, Pierre Gasly. The Frenchman finished immediately behind him in 16th place, just 31 thousandths back, after completing an identical run plan with a similar setup on his car.

Lando Norris set the pace

At the top of the standings, the reliability of the McLaren MCL40 allowed world champion Lando Norris to set the fastest time in FP2 with a lap of 1m15.426s.

The Briton was just 9 thousandths quicker than George Russell’s Mercedes (who had topped the first practice session) and 57 thousandths ahead of his teammate, Oscar Piastri. Behind them, Charles Leclerc (Ferrari), championship leader Kimi Antonelli, and Max Verstappen rounded out the leading positions, with Verstappen drawing attention as the only front-runner to lap exclusively on hard tires in his Red Bull.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.