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Red Bull's Max Verstappen sets the pace in blisteringly fast second practice at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix

The Baku street track is a circuit of two halves, because some of it is frankly Mickey Mouse with tight corners and limited space, and some blisteringly fast

David Tremayne
Baku
Friday 23 June 2017 19:38 BST
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Both Jolyon Palmer and Sergio Perez suffered crashes in Baku
Both Jolyon Palmer and Sergio Perez suffered crashes in Baku

Twenty racing drivers – arguably 20 of the best in the world – competed for the fastest time in the two practice sessions here on Friday.

In the second fourteen of them, some more than once, either spun or went down escape roads. It was a not dissimilar story in the first session, at the beginning of the afternoon. Two drivers - Sergio Perez and Jolyon Palmer - did their cars a power of no good.

They call the Baku street track a circuit of two halves, because some of it is frankly Mickey Mouse with tight corners and limited space, and some blisteringly fast. It’s often windy too, though that was not the big factor today.

The surface was dirty. That meant cars were sliding around in any case, despite two sessions for the Formula 2 cars as well which should have helped it to rubber in – when a layer of used rubber smeared on to the Tarmac by the passing of racing cars helps the surface to grip up.

That sliding, allied to the fact that there were so many incidents, meant few got the consistent laps they needed to get Pirelli’s tyres in to their narrow temperature operating windows. And then the tyres aren’t hot enough, the braking gets affected, so does the cornering, and cars go down escape roads, get their tyres dirtier still, and so the vicious cycle continues.

Never in a Formula 1 session was reverse gear used by so many, the situation nearing farce in the evening session when, having visited the escape road in Turn 8 for the umpteenth time, world championship points leader Sebastian Vettel had to wait for Felipe Massa to back up in his Williams before he could do likewise.

Verstappen impressed in both sessions

If you were a spectator it was exciting and you’d probably feel you’d got a good bang for your buck, possibly it was even slightly comical.

If you were a driver intent on honing the set-up of your car while making the critical decisions with your engineers about the delicate balance between decent cornering grip in the tight stuff and maximum terminal velocity on the superlong straight where top speeds were in excess of 205 mph, there was nothing remotely musing about it. Frustration was rife.

Max Verstappen, the Dutch wonderkid, was the man in both sessions, heading his Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo by nearly half a second in the first, and Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas and Ricciardo by a tenth in the second. But even he had his moments, nosing towards a wall in Turn 2 soon after going fastest, and then ending his day crashing in to the wall in Turn 1.

He’d gone into the left-hand corner a trifle too fast, braked even harder than usual, started to run wide, then, in attempting to make a clockwise circle that would take him through the escape road and back on to

He was not alone. Romain Grosjean went off the road five times in his Haas, Lewis Hamilton in his Mercedes four, but Vettel set the record with eight.

"This has definitely been the most positive Friday of the year so far," Verstappen said.

Palmer was involved in a crash

"To be first with not an ideal lap - I went out of the garage with yellow flags and the virtual safety car, so you cannot warm up the tyres as you want to - so still to be up there is very positive. To stay there will be really difficult, but at least we have better pace than normal.

"From lap one I felt really good in the car, even though in the short runs in practice I could not take the maximum out of it because of traffic and yellow flags and stuff, so we can be quite happy with this.

“But the accident was very weird, to be honest. I locked up and I was still trying to make the corner and then I decided to play it safe and take the exit road. But then suddenly I lost the rear and then I have a four-wheel power slide into the barriers."

Hamilton found it tough going in Baku

Hamilton was fast on the soft compound tyres, but never got decent runs on the supersoft and finished the evening session 10th with the time he set on the former.

“It was a difficult day out there,” the Englishman said.

“This circuit is a tough one and we had a few challenges that we tried to work through today. We've clearly still got lots of work to do ahead of qualifying, but Valtteri's time in FP2 looked promising, so there is obviously pace in the car, which is encouraging. Now it's just a case of getting our heads together tonight to work out exactly how to extract that pace across the entire weekend.”

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