Under brighter and slightly warmer conditions compared to Friday, Verstappen lined up first at the end of the pitlane and led off on a long first stint on the mediums, which meant he set the first place benchmark at 1m30.265s, but was soon supplanted by the soft-shod Hamilton.
The Mercedes driver’s 1m30.065s first flier remained the top spot throughout the first third of the one-hour session, which featured Kevin Magnussen going off into the gravel at the hairpin and Daniel Ricciardo spinning at Turn 2.
To make up for the FP2 washout on Friday, the teams then spent the middle part of the session completing long-run data-gathering stints nearly five seconds off the leading pace.
This meant Hamilton’s early flier continued as the benchmark way past the halfway point, with his team-mate Russell book-ending the standings at this stage for Mercedes, with the younger Briton having started FP3 with a long run immediately, using the medium tyres.
Red Bull and Ferrari also spent the middle phase of the session assessing the durability of the yellow-walled tyres, while Mercedes and McLaren had Hamilton and Oscar Piastri respectively do their higher fuel running on the softs.
Aston Martin went alone in using hard tyres aboard the AMR23s – Fernando Alonso’s finally running the updated sidepods that had been on Lance Stroll’s car only on Friday.
In the other McLaren, Lando Norris eschewed a similar run plan – instead making set-up alterations in the pits and then attempting a further flier to the one that had put him third in the early stages on used tyres.
Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
As the final third approached, the pack headed back to the pits en masse and re-emerged after a lull in track action for a 15-minute blast of flying efforts on soft tyres to give the drivers a final chance to get their eyes in on lower fuel ahead of qualifying.
With 10 minutes to go, Russell jumped from the foot of the field to finally topple Hamilton’s leading time with a 1m29.918s before Verstappen forged ahead on a 1m29.563s – a lap that featured no purple sectors.
Hamilton’s late qualifying simulation run returned a personal best, but a fraction behind Russell, with the pair then shuffled back by Perez’s run to 0.269s behind Verstappen in second – where he complained about his wing mirrors oscillating as his team-mate had done earlier.
With Alonso slotting into fifth for Aston, Norris’s personal best put him sixth – the McLaren driver having to abandon his first late flier on new softs due to a big sideways moment at Degner 2, where Piastri had also saved a huge snap on the exit kerb during the long runs.
Norris’s best time therefore came with softs well past their best, while Ferrari’s cause was led by Sainz in seventh – the red team running slightly out of kilter with the other frontrunners due to spending more time long-running in the middle phase/
But Charles Leclerc could only manage 10th in the other SF-24, behind the Sainz-trailling Piastri and Yuki Tsunoda.
