Vettel holds the lead at the end of seventh day

After an intense morning, with very fast lap times, the afternoon began with Stoffel Vandoorne being the first driver to go on track to do more laps. He was closely followed by Lance Stroll and Lewis Hamilton, who were replacing their respectives team mates.

As it happened yesterday at this time of the day, the teams focused on doing long runs at this stage of the session. They were testing race pace, pit-stops, etc. The timetable did not change at all, but the focus was on the race pace.

Hamilton put the hard tyres, which had not been seen yet, and did some regular 1:20 laps, while Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen were doing 1:21 laps with softer compounds (fuel loads are, however, unknown). Only Hamilton and Carlos Sainz, who had not driven in the morning, improved their positions.

With few more than an hour to go, Marcus Ericsson lost control of his car at turn 4 and ended up on the gravel trap, forcing the first and only red flag of the season.

When the red flag waved and the last minutes arrived, some teams put on the softest tyres again and look for competitive laptimes. Sainz moved up to fourth place and Pierre Gasly to third.

The session finished and Vettel held his lead with the record lap time he set during the morning. He was surprisingly followed by Kevin Magnussen and Gasly. As for the number of laps, Verstappen was the driver who did more laps, with 187, while Williams was the less active with 137 laps.

Tomorrow, pre-season will come to an end after eight days of testing on which teams must have everything ready if they want to be competitive in the Australian GP. On track action will start at 09:00 as usual.

Final results: