F1: Chinese GP practice hints at tight race after Lewis Hamilton heads packed top five

Hopes that Sunday’s Chinese GP might turn out to be a three-horse race were raised when the top five cars were covered by just three-tenths of a second in Friday’s chilly second practice session, and Lewis Hamilton said that his Mercedes team need to bring their “A game”.

Hamilton set the fastest time, as he had in the morning’s hour and a half of running, but Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari was just seven-thousandths of a second adrift, and just thirty three hundredths ahead of Valtteri Bottas’s Mercedes. That was a tenth faster than Sebastian Vettel in the other Ferrari, with Max Verstappen putting his Red Bull within two-tenths of the Australian and Bahrain GP winner.

“When I got to Shanghai the weather was really good, but it’s gone downhill,” Hamilton said. “Now we’ve got the rain and it’s cold. But it’s been a good day, we got through all the laps that we needed and got some good feedback about the car. All the tyres here are quite similar in pace, so there’s not a big difference between them even though we have the double step between the soft and the ultrasoft. The balance of the car is good but we have some fine-tuning to do on it tonight.”

Hamilton desperately needs a win here to stem Ferrari’s red tide, but the world champion is under no illusions.

“Ferrari were quick and Red Bull looked really fast on the long runs,” he said, having traded race-run pace with the Verstappen. “It’s good to see all the times so close, but it means that we really need to bring our A game. We need everyone in the team to be on it throughout the weekend, because it’s a joint effort.”

Hamilton, Raikkonen, Bottas and Verstappen all had minor off-track moments without doing any damage to their cars, while Vettel was again not as quick as his team-mate on the first day.

Like Hamilton, Verstappen needs a good result here, and he was carrying Red Bull’s hopes as team-mate Daniel Ricciardo struggled with a handing problem.

“We spent a bit of time during the first session today working on the setup of the car in order to understand it better,” Verstappen said. “By the end of the day the pace was looking good and I think we can be happy with the car’s performance.

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“It’s always good to finish a day’s running with no major problems and we don’t look too far off. We just managed to fit in a longer stint before the rain came towards the end of the second session, so we didn’t feel the need to stay out. The long runs were once again very positive and I felt pretty comfortable. A little bit of fine-tuning on the short runs to get the balance better, and we should be all right. This track is good for overtaking anyway, so I think we can have a good race judging by our pace.”

Interestingly, engine supplier Renault have said they could find no trace of a problem with Verstappen’s power unit during qualifying in Bahrain last weekend when he blamed a sudden 150 bhp surge for an accident in Q1.

Renault’s managing director Cyril Abiteboul said: “The engine has done exactly what the throttle was asking, it was very clear. It’s a determinist thing, cause and consequence, when you press on the throttle, something is happening to the engine. The engine has reacted in exactly the same way that it was supposed to react.”