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Valtteri Bottas has set a new fastest lap of pre-season testing with a 1m 19.310s to keep a one-tenth of a second advantage over Felipe Massa who continues to impress after his retirement U-turn at Williams.
Having topped the opening pre-season test for Mercedes last week, the Finnish driver has set a new benchmark to beat when he ran a qualifying simulation to produce the new fastest lap of pre-season testing using the red banded super-softs.
But Massa didn't allow Mercedes to stretch too far clear as he also ran a hot laps using ultra softs tyres to set a 1m 19.420s to trail by just 0.110s at the lunchbreak before handing over to his new Williams team-mate Lance Stroll for this afternoon.
After topping day one of the second test and notching up 168 laps, Massa added another 63 laps to his total for this week to demonstrate unwavering reliability from the Williams FW40, completing over three race distances in a day and a half.
Ferrari suffered a rare hiccup this morning when Kimi Raikkonen effectively lost half of his track time to a fluids system check but was still able to post 36 laps with an best lap time of 1m 20.406s to claim third.
That left Red Bull to have a low-key session behind the top three with 34 laps completed without Max Verstappen chasing outright lap times.
Renault continued to demonstrate their strong mid-pack pace with Nico Hulkenberg taking fifth and adding 53 laps to the French manufacturers overall total, staying just ahead of Sergio Perez who improved late on to move within a tenth of Renault in the Force India VJM10.
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