Ferrari's Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc were fastest in Saturday's final practice at the Red Bull Ring, the pair leading their arch-rival, Red Bull's Max Verstappen by over a tenth of a second.
The top contenders made good use of the soft tyre in the session, but Alpine's Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon relied on the medium compound to complete the top five.
Onboard their repaired and refurbished pair of Silver Arrows, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton set respectively the seventh and ninth quickest time, with the seven-time world champion taking to the track late in the session as his Mercedes crew completed the Briton's chassis change.
Drivers cued up in an orderly fashion at the end of pitlane ahead of the start of the final session before this afternoon's sprint race.
But when the light went green, Mercedes' pair of cars were still under preparation in the Brackley squad's garage, their mechanics putting the finishing touches to the very important repair jobs that were necessary after Hamilton and Russell's unexpected crashes in qualifying.
The seven-time world champion's W13 in particular suffered significant damage that required a full chassis change by his team,
Verstappen lost no time positioning himself at the top of the time sheet minutes into the session, the soft-shod Red Bull charger still followed like his shadow by Ferrari's Leclerc and Sainz who began their 60-minute workout on the mediums.
While Hamilton's car was going nowhere in a hurry, Russell undertook an installation lap to make sure that there were no missing nuts or bolts on his refurbished W13.
The Briton had no issues to report and quickly got down to business, impressively slotting himself into third in the early running order, behind Verstappen and Sainz.
But Leclerc's switch to the soft tyre yielded a 1m08.660s that pushed him to the top, 0.139s ahead of Verstappen.
However, a pair of fast-moving Alpine's, on the medium tyre what's more, saw Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon pick up the pace and set the third and fourth fastest times.
©Mercedes
As the session approached its final 15 minutes, Sainz supplanted Leclerc at the front, while Hamilton finally joined the action onboard his rebuilt W13. The Briton was on it at from the outset, his first timed lap on the soft tyre good enough for P9.
But a look at the sector times revealed that no single driver was dominant, with the three portions of the circuit split between Sainz, Leclerc and Verstappen.
The checkered flag was brandished with no changes among the top five, with Sainz thus leading Leclerc, Verstappen, Alonso and Ocon.
Sergio Perez led the second half of the top-ten from Russell, Valtteri Bottas, Hamilton and McLaren's Lando Norris.
Aston Martin's Lance Stroll concluded FP2 P11 while his teammate Sebastian Vettel was P13 but led the lap count with a massive 44 laps on the board.
Pierre Gasly in P12 led AlphaTauri's efforts while Yuki Tsunoda was a lowly 19th, while in the Haas camp Mick Schumacher and Kevin Magnussen were respectively P15 and P18.
Daniel Ricciardo's weekend in Austria still showed no signs of improvement with the Aussie clocking in a worrying P17, just one spot behind Williams' Alex Albon whose teammate Nicholas Latifi closed out the field.
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter
