Leclerc tops Dutch GP second practice, Hamilton breaks down
Leclerc led a Ferrari 1-2 in another stop-start session at Zandvoort with a lap time that was 0.154s faster than teammate Carlos Sainz, while Esteban Ocon produced an impressive lap to put his Alpine third, just 0.172s off the pace.
The 60-minute session was truncated by two red flag periods, the first of which occurred just five minutes into the session when Hamilton suffered a power outage in his Mercedes and ground to a halt.
Hamilton reported a loss of power on just his second lap of the session and was told by Mercedes’ engineers to stop his car on track, before proceeding to pull over at Turn 8.
Mercedes will be concerned about the state of Hamilton’s power unit, particularly after it saw Aston Martin’s Sebastian Vettel hit by an engine problem that significantly curtailed running in FP1.
The early FP2 stoppage acts as a blow to the seven-time world champion, who carried out zero relevant running and will go into final practice on Saturday morning with a lack of experience on either the qualifying or race simulations.
It meant teammate Valtteri Bottas was left to do the majority of the FP2 legwork in the second Mercedes in order to complete the team’s practice programme.
The Finn conducted his low fuel, soft tyre run earlier than most of his rivals and ended up fourth in the timesheets, 0.230s down on Leclerc’s benchmark.
He finished a tenth clear of Hamilton’s main championship rival Max Verstappen, who was left frustrated after seeing a number of his laps hampered by issues for other drivers.
Having already been forced to abort his opening run of FP2 when Hamilton stopped, Verstappen then had to abandon his first soft tyre flying lap when Haas rookie Nikita Mazepin spun and beached himself into the gravel at the Turn 11 chicane, causing the second red flag of the session.
“It’s insane. Just can’t get a lap, man,” Verstappen lamented over team radio.
When Verstappen finally got a clean run in, it was only good enough to put him fifth, over three-tenths down on Leclerc’s session-topping 1m10.902s.
Alpine’s Fernando Alonso was sixth ahead of AlphaTauri racer Pierre Gasly, who narrowly outpaced the fastest McLaren of Lando Norris.
Antonio Giovinazzi and Sebastian Vettel rounded out the rest of the top-10 order for Alfa Romeo and Aston Martin respectively.
Full second practice results for the 2021 F1 Dutch Grand Prix.
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