Nico Rosberg was the fastest in FP2 while Lewis Hamilton hit the wall in the early stages of the session. Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel finished second and third.
Romain Grosjean was the first driver to head out on track in FP2. Fernando Alonso suffered from a power unit failure and stayed in the pits during the first part of the session. Unlike in FP1, Ferrari went out with soft tyres for the first time of the week-end. After their first flying laps, no more than one hundreth stood between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.
But the British driver locked the rear at turn 11 in a flying lap and hit the wall sideways. Depsite the fact he managed to rejoin the pits, the session was interrupted to fix the tyre barriers. The session started again for one hour and eight minutes. While Rio Haryanto got a debris in his front-right tyre, Alonso managed to get on track with one hour to go.
At that point, Hamilton was still the fastest of the session ahead of Rosberg, Kimi Raikkonen was third 98 hundredths off. But Rosberg improved by more than one second and a half over his teammate who could not go back on track. 15 minutes later, Daniel Ricciardo got closer from Rosberg to stand only half a second off the leader.
Drivers are being told to respect the pit lane entry as Valtteri Bottas and Carlos Sainz Jr were under investigation for crossing the white line in the pitlane entry. Sebastian Vettel finally managed to have a decent laptime and sneaked between the two Red Bull drivers.
With twenty minutes to go, every driver except Lewis Hamilton and Jolyon Palmer were on track. Felipe Nasr parked his car in the first sector and surprised Carlos Sainz who spun at the exact same place, before parking his car a few laps later. With ten minutes to go, Palmer managed to go on track for the first time in FP2.
Nico Rosberg set the fastest time of FP2 in 1:20.435, 0.595s faster than Daniel Ricciardo, 0.913s ahead of Sebastian Vettel. Verstappen, Hamilton, Raikkonen, Alonso, Button, Hulkenberg and Perez completed the top 10.
