Red Bull’s Max Verstappen headed McLaren’s Lando Norris in Friday practice at the Mexico City Grand Prix.
The world champion was 0.119 seconds ahead of Norris, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc 0.147secs adrift in third.
There were a couple of surprises just outside the top three – with Valtteri Bottas’ Alfa Romeo fourth and Daniel Ricciardo’s Alpha Tauri sixth.
Red Bull’s Sergio Perez took fifth and Lewis Hamilton seventh in the Mercedes, struggling over one lap.
But although Hamilton looked off the pace on his qualifying simulation run, the Mercedes was stronger on race pace, with Hamilton actually faster than Verstappen on average on his long run.
Fastest of all was Norris, while the Ferraris typically were the slowest of the leading cars over a series of laps.
Behind Hamilton, Alpine’s Esteban Ocon, McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Hamilton’s team-mate George Russell completed the top 10, after missing the first session while Mercedes handed his car to young driver Frederik Vesti.
The one big incident of the session was a high-speed spin for Fernando Alonso in the middle of the Esses.
The Aston Martin driver caught it expertly, keeping the car away from the walls and popping a gear and getting going again as soon as the car was pointing in the right direction.
But the spin wrecked his soft tyres and the two-time champion ended the session last because he could not complete a lap time on the fastest rubber.
There were sprinkles of rain early in the session and as it came to an end, but not enough to stop the drivers from running on slick dry-weather tyres.
In the first session – in which Verstappen was also fastest – five teams used up one of their two mandatory young driver outings.
The fastest of them was Briton Oliver Bearman, a member of the Ferrari driver academy, who impressed in the Haas with 15th fastest time, four places and 0.4secs behind race driver Nico Hulkenberg.
Bearman had a scary moment when he got the car on the kerbs at the Esses and had to rescue what could have been a crash, but set a faster time on the soft tyres on his next lap.
Frenchman Isack Hadjar in the Alpha Tauri was 17th, 1.4secs slower than Ricciardo, ahead of Alpine’s Jack Doohan and Vesti in the Mercedes.
Frenchman Theo Pourchaire had a torrid time in the Alfa Romeo, with a succession of braking problems that meant he failed even to complete a flying lap before his session was brought to a premature close.
