Perez continue his fine form over Verstappen. Could he win this weekend? If he does, there is a good chance he could take over the WDC lead. And what would Red Bull do? Tell Max to be the good wingman? Jos is definitely gonna blow another gasket.
Apart from being slower the Perez, Verstappen's DRS system is still wonky, literally the storyline for 2022. Is Red Bull playing favourite and give Verstappen the lighter car but it backfired? Or was Red Bull planning more cheats with trick wing on Verstappen's car? This is more money wasted on parts by Red Bull, who are already in a cap crunch.
Leclerc again looks very fine on practices, he is definitely on top of the Ferrari for sure, better than Sainz.
Ricciardo, he definitely doesn't fit the McLaren car, he needs another car in order to perform his best. But there aren't too many options for him. Not the 2 Red Bull teams, not Mercedes, not Ferrari. Not Haas, not Alfa. Really only teams he can moved to will be Williams or Aston. Outside chance of returning to Alpine.
Alpine is coming on strong, could they over take Mercedes and become the 3rd fastest team? For sure they won't be the team that can't balance their books and forced to skip races. Heck, they could be the last man standing at the end of the season and Alonso win another title by default.
Mercedes are down on power, down on aero, down on handling, they are so far off it's not even funny. Great job by Russell to drag it to where he placed. He really validated his ability to drag slow ass cars up the field. Also looks like Mercedes is still running different setups between Russell and Hamilton, in order to gain as much data on the new car as possible for the second half of the season.
But at least it's just FP2 times, they aren't quite running race spec parts yet so the order can still change.
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