Championship contender Pierre Gasly put his foot down in today’s GP2 free practice session, the final one of the 2016 season. The PREMA Racing driver was 6 hundredths of a second faster than Alex Lynn (DAMS) with a laptime of 1:50.940. The second PREMA Racing driver, championship leader Antonio Giovinazzi, was one tenth off his teammate’s pace and finished the session in third place.
As was to be expected, it was a hot and sunny day in Abu Dhabi as the lights went green for the final GP2 race weekend of 2016. All drivers remained on the harder tyre compound, the medium tyre, for the entire session. With the tyres up to temperature, the laptimes tumbled down quickly in the opening minutes of the session until Gasly settles down on top of the time sheets with a first benchmark laptime of 1:51.843. Nobuharu Matsushita was five tenths off Gasly’s pace in his first attempt, but the ART GP driver demoted the Frenchman in his second flying lap right afterwards with a lap of three absolute best sectors. The Japanese kept pushing and even improved his own laptime further; however, Gasly was eventually able to reclaim the top position, while Giovinazzi moved up to third place.
Around the halfway mark, the free practice session came to an early end for Mitch Evans. The Campos Racing driver had to stop his car, but he was able to pull into an emergency exit so that there was no need to interrupt the session to have the stricken car removed.
With all drivers out on fresh Pirelli rubber after the usual mid-session pit stops, Giovinazzi beat Gasly’s lap by three hundredths of a seconds. The top three of Giovinazzi, Gasly, and Matsushita were now covered by only one tenth of a second. Fourth-placed Norman Nato was already half a second off the pace. Gasly eventually snatched the top spot from his team mate again, being the first and only man to lap the Yas Marina Curcuit in less than one minute and 51 seconds.
Unusually, almost all drivers made a second pitstop with only ten minutes left on the clock. The final stage of the session saw little improvements. Lynn made the jump up to second place, but the rest of the top positions remained unchanged as Giovinazzi failed to improve in his final effort and had to settle for third ahead of Matsushita, Nato, Oliver Rowland (MP Motorsport), Jordan King (Racing Engineering), Johnny Cecotto (Rapax), Sergey Sirotkin (ART GP), and Nicholas Latifi (DAMS). The third championship contender, Raffaele Marciello (Trident), finished the session in eleventh place, one second off the pace of Gasly.
