Hamilton sets the pace in opening practice

Lewis Hamilton set the fastest time of this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix’s opening practice session.

The McLaren driver was two tenths of a second quicker than Vettel and Alonso. Webber and Button completed the top five. Massa was sixth fastest ahead of the Mercedes of Rosberg and Schumacher.

Driving the Renault of Nick Heidfeld this morning, Bruno Senna set the 15th fastest time and was 0.7s slower than Vitaly Petrov.

Most of the drivers stick with the soft tyre in this session, saving their super soft tyre for when the track conditions are better.

How the session unfolded :

As is often the case, the session got to a very slow start. The circuit is not used too much during the year which means the teams are always faced on Friday with a green and dusty track. These conditions obviously led the front-runners to bide their time and let the others do the cleaning.

They kicked off work with installation laps and some aero work. Nico Hulkenberg embarked on a proper run twenty minutes in the session and set the early benchmark. Toro Rosso’s Buemi was the next man to post a time on the board and went 2nd to the Force India reserve driver.

As Hulkenberg pitted, Buemi upped his pace and took over at the front. Jenson Button then joined the track and initially slotted in 3rd place. He improved next time round and set the fastest time. He kept pushing but was demoted to 2nd place by his teammate Hamilton.

Massa split the McLaren pair while his teammate Alonso took over at the front. There was more to come from the Ferraris in this run. Both improved to go 1st and 2nd….only to be split by Webber’s Red Bull seconds later. At this point, Sebastian Vettel had just left the pits for his first run of the weekend.

The World Champion adopted his usual steady approach and gently gathered speed to move up the order.

As the session reached its midway point, the German was 16th. Alonso was leading from Webber, Massa, Hamilton and Button.

Vettel swiftly moved up to 3rd, 0.3s behind Alonso. He wrapped up his first run with the fastest lap. So with 37 minutes remaining, the Red Bull driver was leading from Alonso and Webber.

Alonso came out for a second run but appeared to carry a rather significant fuel load. Button, Hamilton and Webber also resumed their work on track. Both McLarens improved and Hamilton slotted in 4th place ahead of his teammate before upping the pace and taking over at the front.

In the meantime, Mark Webber went off at Turn 9 and ripped apart the nose of his RB7. He managed to bring it back in the pits but missed the last 20 minutes of the session as his team was busy repairing his car.

Sebastian Vettel did a solid 2nd run, lapping consistently fast.

Three minutes to the chequered flag, Lewis Hamilton found more speed and was on his way to lower his own benchmark but came across Jaime Alguersuari towards the end of the lap and couldn’t improve.

Traffic in the closing moments of the session prevented most of the drivers from improving their lap times. So it ended with Hamilton on top, 0.2s faster than Vettel and Alonso. Webber was fourth with Button fifth.