Lewis Hamilton beat Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas to the fastest time in FP3 as Mercedes were again the team to beat ahead of qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix.
Hamilton, targeting consecutive victories in Barcelona, set a best lap time of 1:17.281 on the Pirelli supersoft tyres, fractionally faster than Bottas.
The 60-minutes session was marred when Brendon Hartley crashed his Toro Rosso heavily. The accident, right at the end of the session and after Hartley had gone wide onto the grass run-off and lost control at the right-handed turn nine, brought out red flags to halt the action.
Hamilton topped the timesheets with a best lap of one minute 17.281 seconds, a mere 0.013 quicker than Finnish team mate Valtteri Bottas, on supersoft tyres and under overcast skies.
Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, who won the first two races of the season and will be chasing his fourth successive pole position, was third fastest but 0.269 slower than his title rival.
Hamilton leads the German by four points ahead of Sunday’s race, the first of the European season, with some rain forecast before qualifying.
Kimi Raikkonen, with a new engine in the back of his Ferrari, was fourth fastest ahead of Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo and the two Ferrari-powered Haas cars of Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean.
Spain’s two drivers, Renault’s Carlos Sainz and McLaren’s Fernando Alonso, were eighth and ninth respectively.
The Williams nightmare continued, with Canadian Lance Stroll 19th and Russian Sergey Sirotkin 20th.
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