Silverstone, 4 July – There were no great surprises come the end of the first three hours of free practice for Sunday’s British Grand Prix. The Mercedes team, based very close to the Silverstone track, in the town of Brackley, were the dominant force, with Lewis Hamilton topping the time sheet ahead of Nico Rosberg. As we have seen already this season, Fernando Alonso is often the best of the rest and the Ferrari man was third again today, while in the other F14 T, Kimi Raikkonen ended up ninth on the final timesheet of the day, once again finding life a bit tougher than his team-mate.

After running nothing but Soft and Supersoft tyres at the last three Grands Prix, Silverstone marks the return of the Medium and Hard Pirellis, so while the buzzwords from those past races, graining and wear, were not appropriate today, the usual difficulties with getting the Hards up to temperature have returned.

Following the anomalies of Austria, the more aero-dependent curves of this airfield track seem to mark a return to form for Red Bull, with Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel fourth and fifth respectively, while Valtteri Bottas was sixth for Williams, suggesting the team’s form in Austria was genuine. Actually the Finn only drove in the afternoon, because in the morning session lots of press attention was focussed on the appearance of Susie Wolff in the Williams cockpit, the first woman to be part of an F1 race weekend for 22 years.

Track conditions are key here and naturally, they improved as more rubber went down, so that FP2 times were around a second faster than in the morning. However, if the threat of overnight rain materialises, then the extra grip could literally be washed away, while there’s a strong chance it could still be raining when qualifying gets underway at 13h00 local time; always an exciting prospect at this high speed track.