Bird flies to the fastest time in afternoon session

Envision Virgin Racing’s Sam Bird moved ahead of the field in the second official test session of the week, toppling the time set by Maximilian Günther in the morning and ended the first day of action with the fastest time.

Warmer conditions greeted the drivers as the afternoon session got underway, with the air temperature rising to 23c.

There wasn’t much change in the times from the morning in the early stages of the session, but with about an hour and a quarter left to run Sebastien Buemi put in a 1:15.913s to move to the head of the times, 0.013s ahead initial pace setter Günther.

A sole red flag affected proceedings, with James Calado coming to a stop during one of his runs, compounding his misery further having crashed his Jaguar I-Type 4 in the morning session.

From there the remainder of the session was fairly uneventful with some drivers electing to focus on long runs, but towards the end of the session Mitch Evans put in a new fastest lap of 1:15.724s to put his Panasonic Jaguar Racing into P1.

This was only the beginning of the fast laps as drivers used the final moments of the session to try out the attack mode, with the DS Techeetah of Antonio Felix da Costa taking P1 briefly before being beaten by Günther and Bird.

Evans wound up fourth fastest at the chequered flag, leading Vergne and the Nissan e.dams pairing of Buemi and Oliver Rowland. Pascal Wehrlein, Robin Frijns and Daniel Abt rounded out the top ten.