Abu Dhabi – Free Practice 3: Verstappen Impresses Before Qualifying

This final session was an opportunity for the teams to make the final adjustments for both the race strategy and the qualifying session. A dual challenge to judge the soft/medium tire choice. As Daniel Ricciardo noted on Friday, the yellow-banded tires were working better than the red-banded ones on this track.

Norris was the first to set the pace with a 1:38.987 on medium tires before the Red Bull, Mercedes back-and-forth began.

At the start of the session, both Bottas’s and Hamilton’s Mercedes suffered from oversteer, particularly in turn number 12. Verstappen, visibly more comfortable on this circuit, responded to the early times of his direct competitors with a 1:37.202. Hamilton answered a few seconds later by covering the 5.5 km track in under a minute and 37 seconds.

Very much in the background throughout the session, Ferrari, despite a surge from Vettel in the middle of the session, was never able to compete with the trio of Verstappen, Hamilton, and Bottas.

A few minutes before the end of the session, the track is improving, and the drivers are switching back to soft tires. Verstappen has everyone convinced by placing himself at the top of the timesheet with 1:36.566, 7 hundredths ahead of the world champion. A success that contrasts with the difficulties Albon experienced in stringing together decent times in the 3 sectors.

The good performance of the day is credited to Force India and Renault. Sergio Perez, despite an oil leak from his exhausts exiting the pit lane tunnel, managed to finish in 7th place less than a second behind the leader.

Perez car leaking oil, and Kimi gets some on his visor 👀

Quick mop up job and he’s fine 🙂#AbuDhabiGP 🇦🇪 #F1 pic.twitter.com/ELqX9gLBc4

— Formula 1 (@F1) 30 novembre 2019

At the French constructor, Daniel Ricciardo, after the spectacular damage to his power unit the day before, will not face grid penalties. The engine used was a test unit and different from the one dedicated to the race and qualifying. The Australian was in the top 10 throughout the session and finished in 8th place, an encouraging performance for the decisive qualifying session.

As a reminder, and unlike Friday’s session, this session did not experience any on-track incidents.