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Red Bull fighting hard
Max Verstappen has been throwing his Red Bull around all season once topping both Mercedes. FP2 showed more glimpses of this as he topped the timesheet at the end of Friday.
Behind, even more of a surprise was Renault's Daniel Ricciardo only 0.048 seconds behind his old teammate.
The top three ended up less than a tenth apart as Lewis Hamilton put his Mercedes P3 only 0.096 behind Verstappen.
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Midfield ever so close to the front
Alex Albon put a good performance putting his car P4 despite still being 0.390 seconds off of his teammate.
From Albon in fourth to Esteban Ocon in eighth again this group of cars were kept within a tenth of a second of each other. Separating the two were Sergio Perez, Valtteri Bottas and Lando Norris.
The midfield being ever tighter as in this session all the way down to P12 was where the one-second gap to Verstappen ended.
Carlos Sainz was leading the group behind the last in P9, ahead of Pierre Gasly, Lance Stroll and Gaslys teammate Daniil Kvyat.
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Ferrari problems worsen
Behind Kvyat was Ferrari power, but not a Ferrari. Antonio Giovinazzi finished just in front of teammate Kimi Raikkonen beating both works Ferraris by over half a second as well.
Charles Leclerc came home in P15, a position that would be slowest in Q2 come qualifying. As hard as it is to believe, that is good news for Ferrari.
Sebastian Vettel finished behind the Williams of George Russell which left Russell in P16 and Vettel in P17. The only cars to finish behind Vettel were Russell's teammate Nicholas Latifi and the two Haas cars which both had no running in FP1 due to an engine change for both cars.
This weekend and Monza next week are going to be very trying times for the Scuderia.