Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel tops final free practice session of European GP – Formula 1 news
Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel has topped the final free practice session of the 2011 Formula 1 European Grand Prix in Valencia.
The Red Bull duo waited in the pits for almost half an hour before coming out and topping the time charts.
The defending champion posted a fastest time of 1 minute and 37.258 seconds which clearly indicates that Red Bull will again clinch the pole position in Valencia.
Red Bull’s second driver Mark Webber ended his session in fourth place with his fastest lap time of 1 minute and 38.068 seconds.
Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso was able to improve his second session time but was still lagging 0.4 seconds behind Vettel. The Spaniard did a fastest lap time of 1 minute and 37.678 seconds. His teammate Felipe Massa was third on the table with 1 minute and
37.840 seconds.
The fifth fastest time came from McLaren’s Jenson Button who was able to provide some thrill on the track on the option tyres. Button’s teammate Lewis Hamilton was in seventh place with more than one second gap between himself and Vettel.
McLaren tried a new front wing on their cars which seemed to have paid off in the session.
Mercedes’ duo, Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher, was able to put some handsome times on the chart while finishing sixth and eighth in the final session. Although both were more than a second slower than Vettel, still from Mercedes’ point of view, these
were pretty good results.
Renault’s duo, Vitaly Petrov and Nick Heidfeld, completed the top ten drivers list. Petrov posted a fastest time of 1 minute and 38.822 seconds while Heidfeld did 1 minute and 39.113 seconds.
The only incident of the final practice session came from Sauber’s Kamui Kobayashi who lost control of his C30 in the very last moment of the session and broke his front wing.
The qualifiers of the Valencia Grand Prix will be contested later on Saturday, June 25, 2011 and it will be interesting to see how the teams play around the engine mapping rule.
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