Hamilton stays on top in Malaysia

Lewis Hamilton ended Friday practice in Malaysia on top of the timesheets thanks to a fastest 1’34’’175 lap time around Sepang circuit.

The Briton more or less dominated the day, lapping consistently faster than his rivals.

He was briefly relegated to second by Michael Schumacher halfway through the session but retook the lead a few seconds later. He was not challenged after that and ended on top.

Having dedicated most of the session to long and heavy fuel runs, Sebastian Vettel moved up the order in the last 30 minutes and eventually ended 2nd fastest (0.2s away from Hamilton).

Nico Rosberg was once again right up with the leaders and set the 3rd fastest time – he was only 2 thousandths of a second slower than Red Bull’s Vettel.

Jenson Button was fourth fastest but not so happy with his car – he reported understeer on used rubber and instability at the rear. Michael Schumacher rounded off the top five for Mercedes.

Renault enjoyed quite a good session with both its cars in the top ten. Kubica was sixth fastest while his rookie team-mate Vitaly Petrov was ninth fastest ahead of Force India driver Adrian Sutil.

Sebastien Buemi set the eighth fastest time for Toro Rosso, a few hundredths of a second behind Fernando Alonso. The Ferrari team had a rather low-key session with both drivers working mainly on their race pace. Felipe Massa was only fifteenth fastest at the end of the day.

Red Bull suffered more reliability issues. Mark Webber was forced to pull off the track at Turn 9 quite early in the session. The team reported a sudden loss of power on the Australian’s RB6 and wouldn’t elaborate on what the problem was. Christian Horner would only say they suspected an engine problem.

Lotus once again was the fastest of the new teams.