Posted on 6th September 2014
This morning we saw Mercedes picking up where they left off in opening practices yesterday at the Italian Grand Prix, with Nico Rosberg hitting reliability issues while Lewis Hamilton topped the timesheets.
In a near-role reversal of the championship rivals’ fortunes from Friday afternoon, when Hamilton lost much of the session through a misfire, championship leader Rosberg was forced to abandon his Practice Three after just three laps on Saturday morning when a gearbox problem struck his W05.
This meant that Rosberg missed all of the session's low-fuel qualifying simulations which Hamilton predictably went on to dominate and appeared to raise the potentially dramatic spectre of a five-place gearbox change penalty for Rosberg should Mercedes' engineers not be able to resolve the glitch before qualifying.
But Hamilton displayed the searing pace he had already showed a day earlier P1 with a stunning lap of 1:25.519 on the medium tyres to outpace Ferrari's Fernando Alonso by four tenths of a second. It has been Hamilton who has suffered most of Mercedes’ unreliability in qualifying and races this season and he last claimed a pole and outqualified Rosberg at the Spanish GP in May, but now appears to hold the advantage at Monza.
In any case, Mercedes again look comfortably the fastest for a single lap around the high-speed circuit, although the battle for third place downwards looks set to be closely-contested between Williams and home-favourites Ferrari in particular. Fernando Alonso finished the session in second place ahead of the Williams' of Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa who finished in third and fourth places.
Having topped the early stages of the session, Jenson Button claimed a very solid fifth place for McLaren ahead of Sebastian Vettel in sixth place and Kimi Raikkonen who finished the session in seventh place. Daniil Kvyat was the second-fastest Renault-powered runner in eighth place but the Toro Rosso rookie is likely to start Sunday’s race in the lower reaches of the order after he became the first driver this season to have a sixth engine installed in his car and this triggered a ten-place grid penalty for him heading into qualifying.
Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg completed the top ten in ninth and tenth places ahead of Kevin Magnussen in eleventh place and Esteban Guiterrez in twelfth place. Sergio Perez did not have a good session after stopping on the track after 10 laps of running after suffering gearbox issues on his Force India but managed to finish the session in thirteenth place.
Jean-Eric Vergne finished the session in fourteenth place ahead of Adrian Sutil in fifteenth place, Jules Bianchi finishing in sixteenth place and Pastor Maldonado ending the session in seventeenth place. As we head into the latter stages of the grid, Kamui Kobayashi finished the session in eighteenth place ahead of Romain Grosjean in nineteenth place, Max Chilton in twentieth place and also ahead of Marcus Ericsson and Nico Rosberg who did not set a time at all during FP3.
The classification of FP3 at the Italian Grand Prix is as follows below:-
Lewis Hamilton Mercedes 1.25.319
Fernando Alonso Ferrari 0.412s
Valtteri Bottas Williams-Mercedes 0.571s
Felipe Massa Williams-Mercedes 0.595s
Jenson Button McLaren-Mercedes 0.723s
Sebastian Vettel Red Bull-Renault 0.771s
Kimi Raikkonen Ferrari 0.808s
Daniil Kvyat Toro Rosso 0.918s
Daniel Ricciardo Red Bull-Renault 0.963s
Nico Hulkenberg Force India-Mercedes 1.089s
Kevin Magnussen McLaren-Mercedes 1.310s
Esteban Guiterrez Sauber-Ferrari 1.688s
Sergio Perez Force India-Mercedes 1.793s
Jean-Eric Vergne Toro Rosso 1.960s
Adrian Sutil Sauber-Ferrari 1.939s
Jules Bianchi Ferrari 2.506s
Pastor Maldonado Lotus-Renault 2.618s
Kamui Kobayashi Caterham-Renault 2.746s
Romain Grosjean Lotus-Renault 2.940s
Max Chilton Marussia-Ferrari 3.060s
Marcus Ericsson Caterham-Renault 3.732s
Nico Rosberg Mercedes No Time
