Esteban Ocon topped the times at the post-season test as a gruelling 2023 season came to a close in Abu Dhabi.
Photo Credit: BWT Alpine F1 Team
The Alpine driver clocked a 1:24.393 on Tuesday — that was just 0.002s slower than his Q2 time on Saturday which put him P13 on the grid for the Grand Prix.
Arrow McLaren’s IndyCar driver Pato O’Ward was second fastest, 0.017s ahead of F2 runner-up Fred Vesti. Both the Mexican and Dane times were just under 0.9s slower than the ones set by Oscar Piastri and George Russell in Q3 at the weekend.
Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz completed the top 5 as the Spaniard was only 0.061s off his best time in qualifying that saw him get knocked out in Q1.
Alonso, Doohan, Shwartzman, Sargeant and Leclerc completed the top 10.
Two F2 champions in Theo Pourchaire and Felipe Drugovich came next, with Tsunoda, Dennis, Iwasa, Bearman, O’Sullivan, Piastri, Fittipaldi, Russell, Stroll, Colapinto, Ricciardo, Zhou and Albon completing the final classification of this year.
George Russell’s day came to an early end as something broke on his Mercedes and crashed down at turn 6.
2023 F2 driver Ayumu Iwasa had been hoping to complete some more push laps at the end of the day but his AT03 encountered some unreliability.
“In the afternoon, I started to push more. We were putting more new tyres, especially at the end of the day. But, unfortunately, I couldn’t do the last soft tyre [run] because of the car issue,” the Japanese driver stated.
“I don’t know the details – I got the smoke and the fire… I don’t know what happened.”
All the rookies who ran during FP1 on Friday all improved their times on Tuesday as they could log a lot more laps, use more tyres and run when the track was cooler.
Frederik Vesti found over 2s, with Doohan, Shwartzman, O’Sullivan, Bearman, Dennis and Pourchaire all finding over 1.5s.
Photo Credit: Pirelli Motorsport
