The Ferrari points leader used his later run with soft tires to make 1m19.772s and he finished the session just seven hundredths ahead of his likely title contender at the end of the season Verstappen.
But while Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez struggled to match their teammates, the revamped Mercedes W13 continued its impressive performance on Friday when George Russell returned third ahead of his seven-time world team-mate, Lewis Hamilton.
Reproducing his form for the top session of the first and second training sessions, Leclerc effectively won the starting gambit with his first qualifying simulation with soft tires.
The Ferrari driver scored 1m20.278s to sit on top after his first attempt, but was two tenths slower on his second attempt, although he remained in first place ahead of Verstappen and Sainz.
Verstappen did not leave the Red Bull garage for 25 minutes and on the first question, Friday’s racer crossed the 1m20.475 line on a C3 soft tire.
Sainz split the Red Bull pair as he ran to third in front of the home crowd, but like Leclerc, the Spaniard ran two-tenths slower when he threw for another soft fly.
Although Verstappen complained about the low-speed turn of his RB18, his ascent to the second knocked Russell down to fifth – the Briton before the first time of the day set by Valteri Botas, who missed most of the FP2 after the engine stopped.
Hamilton, meanwhile, was sixth earlier, but was hampered by a problem activating his DRS.
Most of the grid was chosen for running with soft tires and this left Daniel Ricciardo as the fastest middle runner in the C2, as McLaren came in 12th in the last 25 minutes of the hour.
Ricciardo’s teammate, Lando Norris, was the first driver to join the session, and he immediately made five laps with medium tires in bed in his new chassis.
MCL36 needed major repairs after Norris escaped from turn 9 in FP2 to drag the floor along the outer curbs, the damage forced the Briton to sit aside.
Similarly, Sainz was wearing a new chassis for his F1-75 after a fuel system problem.
Leclerc then reappeared for his second full-slope run on soft rubber and duly improved to 1m19.772s to set the benchmark, even if he fell one-tenth less than his second practice benchmark.
With the adjusted suspension adjustment of his Ferrari, Sainz improved in his second round to report 1m20.129s, but still lost three tenths less than his teammate.
Adjusting Russell’s settings seems to have paid off well for his next effort, which put him in second place initially as he also fell below 1m20s to make a 1m19.920s hot lap.
Adhering to their unusual running plan, the Red Bulls left four more minutes, leaving only 13 minutes on the FP3 clock before returning to the track.
Verstappen immediately lowered Russell to fourth place when the Dutchman made 1m19.844s to sit just seven hundredths of Leclerc (who is chasing the fourth pole in 2022) in second place.
However, Perez managed to withstand only 1m20.260s to lag behind Sainz in sixth, thanks to Hamilton’s improvement to fourth in 1m20.002s, running 0.09s less than Russell – who had caught the best first sector of the session – to run for 10 minutes.
Behind Sainz and Perez, Norris effectively won recognition as “the best of the rest” as he ran to seventh with a polite effort of 1m20.403s to sit ahead of Kevin Magnussen and Botas.
Esteban Ocon, meanwhile, finished in the top 10 ahead of Ricciardo, charged with the controversial and heavily updated Aston Martin AMR22, led by Sebastian Vettel in 12th place.
Fernando Alonso ran to 13th over Zhou Guanyu and Yuki Tsunoda, the AlphaTauri driver in particular knocked over the curbs of turn 15 to shoot briefly in the air.
Lance Stroll led Williams to Alexander Albon and Nicholas Latifi.
Both Mick Schumacher and Pierre Gasley enter the qualifiers with wet powder after a hard interrupted last workout.
Gasley was forced to return to the pits at the end of his lap during the fire installation, which was serviced by AlphaTauri, but he never returned to the track on board his AT03.
After only four laps of the middle tire, Schumacher suffered a similar smoky fate when the flames began to shoot from his right rear brake into the rim of the wheel.
As he returned to the Haas garage, where the mechanic of the front jack was knocked down and the fire extinguished, it turned out that the rear left corner was also burned.
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