MADRID, 8 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish driver Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) dominated this Friday the second Free Practice of the Canadian Grand Prix, the ninth round of the Formula 1 World Championship, after a day conditioned by the rain on the Gilles Villeneuve Circuit.
The mythical ‘Wall of Champions’ was not the main problem for the pilots, since the weather forecast predicted that rain in the Montreal sky. The British Lando Norris (McLaren), thanks to a last lap on dry tyres, had been the fastest in Free Practice 1, carried out almost entirely with the track wet due to a hailstorm in the moments before the start.
Anecdotally due to this paradigm shift, the Spanish Carlos Sainz and the Monegasque Charles Leclerc had finished with their Ferrari cars, respectively, in second and third position. Several things were going to be modified for Free Practice 2, which lasted an hour without the race being explicitly declared wet.
In the first minutes of uncertainty, Leclerc went out on the circuit with green intermediate tires, but the International Automobile Federation (FIA) interpreted this action by Ferrari as an irregularity and warned that it would investigate what happened at the end of the day.
The expected rain took almost a quarter of an hour to appear, to which Alonso responded to lead the peloton for quite a while thanks to his best lap of 1:17.835. Leclerc himself later set a time of 1:16.556, just as FIA officials approached the Red Bull Racing garage to carry out some checks.
Their objective was the car of the Dutchman Max Verstappen, defending champion and current leader of the World Cup. Journalists at the Gilles Villeneuve reported a certain burning smell in that ‘box’ and the television broadcast showed how the Red Bull engineers were disassembling various parts of the lower part of the car.
Meanwhile, Alonso regained the top spot in the time table with a lap of 1:15.810, an unbeatable mark in the 20 minutes left to run out. The British George Russell (Mercedes) finished second, 0.463 away from the Asturian driver, while Sainz finished thirteenth, staying 1.912 behind his compatriot’s lead.