Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton dominated the second practice session of the 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix weekend.
The second session practice session of the weekend took place on Thursday at 18:00 local time. As the sun set on the track, the conditions were much more representative of what the drivers would experience during the qualifying session and the race.
As this was the only evening practice session, all the drivers took out their soft compound tires and went on the track to do a few qualifying runs before focusing on race simulations.
Surprisingly, Mercedes seemed to be much quicker compared to other rivals. Silver Arrows have not particularly shown a lot of pace during the pre-season testing and the FP1 session, so it would suggest the German team has finally turned up their engines a bit.
Lewis Hamilton started the session with a few qualifying runs. His first lap time was 1:30.751, which he later improved by over three-tenths of a second to 1:30.374.
The seven-time World Champion remained at the top of the timing sheets throughout the whole session as nobody managed to put in a faster lap time.
Red Bull (which was expected to be fastest in qualifying and the race) was only sixth and tenth fastest as even Max Verstappen couldn't get closer to the Mercedes driver than 0.477 seconds away.
Overall, the top ten drivers were equally matched as all put in lap times within eight-tenths of a second from each other. This is, of course, something we would like to see in the real qualifying session, but the real pace of each car is yet to be seen.
Rank | Driver | Team | Time |
1 | Lewis Hamilton | Mercedes | 1:30.374 |
2 | George Russell | Mercedes | +0.206 |
3 | Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin | +0.286 |
4 | Carlos Sainz | Ferrari | +0.395 |
5 | Oscar Piastri | McLaren | +0.410 |
6 | Max Verstappen | Red Bull | +0.477 |
7 | Nico Hulkenberg | Haas | +0.510 |
8 | Lance Stroll | Aston Martin | +0.517 |
9 | Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | +0.739 |
10 | Sergio Perez | Red Bull | +0.741 |
11 | Alex Albon | Williams | +0.516 |
12 | Daniel Ricciardo | RB | +0.544 |
13 | Logan Sargeant | Williams | +0.714 |
14 | Kevin Magnussen | Haas | +0.999 |
15 | Yuki Tsunoda | RB | +1.054 |
16 | Pierre Gasly | Alpine | +1.344 |
17 | Valtteri Bottas | Sauber | +1.938 |
18 | Esteban Ocon | Alpine | +2.275 |
19 | Zhou Guanyu | Sauber | +4.608 |
20 | Lando Norris | McLaren | +5.069 |