After being restricted to just three completed laps during the morning practice session at Istanbul Park, world champion
Kimi Raikkonen had much work to do after lunch.
The Finn, however, was up to the task, rattling off three times as many tours of the Turkish circuit to post the fastest time of the afternoon session and vault from the bottom of the timesheets to the top. It was a close-run thing, however, for the
Ferrari man had
McLaren's
Lewis Hamilton snapping at his heels - and neither proved quite fast enough to overhaul either of the top from the opening 90 minutes.
With rain returning just as the GP2 Series was completing its free practice session, the
F1 drivers returned to a track officially declared wet. For the second time, there was a reluctance to venture out but, with the forecast uncertain for the remainder of the weekend, it did not take long before everyone was exploring the limits, not only of the damp surface, but also a lack of temperature not seen on previous visits to the circuit.
Keen to make up for the time lost to transmission troubles early on, Raikkonen was the first to take a serious stab at a lap time and, with the surface finally beginning to show signs of drying out again, was quickly up to speed. He eventually clocked a 1min 27.543secs best in the course of 30 laps, a total bettered only by Hamilton and
Nick Heidfeld - who both logged 31 - and the hard-working
Sebastien Bourdais, who made up for his lack of Istanbul Park experience by adding 32 to his morning haul of 19.
While the track time did little to move the Frenchman too far up the pecking order, Hamilton's return was good enough to get him to within 0.036secs of the world champion, providing encouraging signs for McLaren even if little can be read into Friday's relative performances. Sadly for both Raikkonen and Hamilton, however, their efforts were not sufficient to dislodge either their respective team-mates from the top of the combined leaderboard.
