LIVE: Italian Grand Prix - FP2

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Follow live coverage of the second practice session for the Italian Grand Prix from Monza with F1i.

The final race of the European season takes place at the iconic Autodromo Nazionale di Monza this weekend, with Lewis Hamilton holding a nine-point lead over team-mate Nico Rosberg in the drivers' championship following Hamilton's fightback in Belgium last weekend.

LIVE: Italian Grand Prix - FP2

It was Rosberg who topped the times in the opening session on Friday morning, beating his team-mate by 0.2s on the soft compound tyre. While the margin to the rest of the field was over a second, Mercedes improved on the softs compared to the supersoft tyre as it again struggled to get the most of the red-walled Pirellis.

By contrast, Ferrari has yet to use the supersoft and was third and fourth with Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel respectively. The Scuderia will hope to be able to extract more performance from the supersofts when they are used later in FP2, in order to close the gap to Mercedes.

Force India again looked strong on Friday morning but Sergio Perez - fifth fastest - set his best time on the supersoft tyre, as did Romain Grosjean in sixth for Haas. Haas actually had both drivers in the top ten, with both Haas and Ferrari running an updated power unit which saw the last of Ferrari's development tokens used.

You can follow all the action from Monza live at 14:00 local time (1pm BST) for the second 90-minute practice session. We'll be bringing you all the news and information from trackside as it happens on F1i's live page, where you can also get involved with your questions and comments.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.