Webber fastest in Catalunya opening practice

Practice for the Spanish Grand Prix kicked off this morning with a 90 minutes session which saw Red Bull Racing setting the pace.

The teams concentrated on evaluating their latest updates as well as the various Pirelli tyres available to them this weekend.

Mark Webber set the fastest time of the morning, 1s clear of his nearest rival – his teammate Sebastian Vettel. Nico Rosberg was third fastest for Mercedes with Alonso and Perez completing the top five.

Hamilton was seventh fastest for McLaren. Two seconds covered the top ten drivers.

How the session unfolded :

Installation laps animated the start of the session as teams sampled the track conditions.

Quite unusually, though, some of the bigger teams didn’t wait for the small teams to set the early pace. Massa and the Mercedes drivers posted the first times on the board as they started evaluating the latest updates brought on their cars.

Perez and Kobayashi joined the action afterwards, as well as Karthikeyan and Hamilton. The Red Bull drivers were not in the same hurry and were both seen out of their cars.

But when Mark Webber came out for his first run, he blitzed the field and went two seconds quicker than anybody else. McLaren’s Button closed the gap to 1.6s but the Australian further improved and brought the gap back to 1.9s. In the meantime, Vettel steadily upped his pace and slotted in P2, 1.4s down on his teammate.

Halfway through the session, Webber was leading from Vettel, Rosberg, Button and Alonso.

Alonso and Rosberg then gathered speed and split the Red Bulls. They were still a second slower than Webber though.

Pastor Maldonado went off track with 34 minutes remaining but managed to stop his Williams before it hit the wall. He couldn’t restart and the marshalls had to loft his FW33 over the barrier.

There were very few improvements in the latter part of the session.