As expected, Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel bounced back to the top of the charts at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix’s final practice session.
The German was 0.361s faster than his nearest rival Lewis Hamilton in the red-flagged session.Vettel’s teammate Kimi Räikkönen took the third place in the charts and the Finn was followed by Max Verstappen.
The session was interrupted by a red Flag when Williams rookie Sergey Sirotkin crashed hard into the wall at Turn 3 left-hander.
Valtteri Bottas managed to clock the fifth best time of the session. Force India driver Sergio Perez came sixth in the time charts despite losing out on his final run. He was closely followed by Haas driver Kevin Magnussen at seventh.
Sirotkin’s teammate Lance Stroll showed up at eighth while the Russian managed to clock the 10th best time while the duo was divided by Perez’s teammate Esteban Ocon in the ninth place.
McLaren’s Fernando Alonso found himself out of the top 10 in the final session and Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo was at 12th after aborting a late push due to traffic.
Most teams except for Renault ran on ultrasofts as the harder tyres were limited in supply.
As anticipated, Vettel sprung back in the final session. We predict he will have a better performance in the qualifying round as well, based on the fact that similar thing happened in the last two races.
The biggest news though is how Hamilton has managed to come back to the top. Was it due to the over night changes made on the car or was it because of Mercedes allowing a higher power mode for longer? In any case, the qualifying just became a lot more interesting.
