There’s no gold star for saying Mercedes, because that’s too easy. But as ever Lewis Hamilton was right up there, with fastest time in his nine laps by 0.863s from Sebastian Vettel. He had been fastest earlier too, but dropped down to 10th as others improved while he pitted to have the car ‘reconfigured,’ as Mercedes put it. By the time he emerged with 23 minutes remaining the conditions were definitely not as good as they had been earlier, yet he put a lap together and really nailed it.



The fastest times in the first two sectors, and third fastest in the last one, left him comfortably clear of the rest and his corrected advantage was probably closest to a second.



Not so team mate Nico Rosberg, who only did seven laps after early on taking the front wing off his Mercedes when he spun and collected the wall at Turn 3. That put him on his back foot and left him ninth in the order. Clearly he’ll be faster in qualifying, but he has some work to do.



The Ferraris looked good, and Kimi Raikkonen was close to Vettel, but while Hamilton was doing his fast run the German was floundering for grip and aquaplaning off on two occasions. The Scuderia will hope that was more of a consequence of the amount of standing water more than a question mark over their wet set-up. And, of course, because they are using their new engine there will be a drop of 10 grid places apiece for the drivers.



Force India looked strong. Nico Hulkenberg was fastest in sector three and third overall, and both he had team mate Sergio Perez were at the high end of the lap spectrum with 12 laps each.



Williams really seemed to have a handle on their wet set-up, with Valtteri Bottas fourth and Felipe Massa 10th. They did a lot of laps, too, 14 for the Finn which was the highest of all, and 13 for the Brazilian, and they had the fifth and sixth best speeds through the main trap.