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30 July 2010

Red Bull Racing's Sebastian Vettel led the way this morning in opening practice for this weekend's F1 2010 Hungarian Grand Prix, and the Milton Keynes-based outfit was in dominant form.

Vettel posted the early marker for the weekend, a 1 minute 20.976 seconds, near the end of the one and a half hour session, and that put him just 0.130 seconds up on Mark Webber in the sister RB6. More importantly though, that left them well out front and with Vettel ominously 1.096 seconds up on Robert Kubica.

Kubica was 'best of the rest' for Renault, with F1 2009 world champion, Jenson Button fourth in his McLaren, four tenths further back.

Rubens Barrichello had an encouraging start and was fifth for Williams, less than two tenths off JB, while Pedro de la Rosa was also on form and sixth for Sauber, fractionally in front of German Grand Prix 'winner' Fernando Alonso and then the Mercedes GP cars of Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg. Nico Hulkenberg rounded out the top ten, the last of the runners in the 1 minute 22 second bracket.

Further down the order, Adrian Sutil was eleventh as Force India evaluated its blown diffuser. He finished FP1, 0.004 seconds ahead of Felipe Massa, who of course is returning to the scene of his horror crash at the Hungaroring twelve months ago.

Renault man and F1 2010 rookie, Vitaly Petrov came in 13th, followed by Sauber's Kamui Kobayashi and Force India's test and reserve driver, Paul di Resta. di Resta, unlike Sutil though, wasn’t running with the new diffuser.

Toro Rosso’s Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari were 16th and 17th respectively, while Lewis Hamilton was only 18th on a 1m 24.075s, 1.5 seconds off the sister McLaren.

At the back, the new teams came in two-by-two, Jarno Trulli just in front of his Lotus team-mate, Heikki Kovalainen in 19th, while Timo Glock headed the Virgins in 21st and Bruno Senna was the quickest for Hispania. Senna finished up 1.1 seconds up on Sakon Yamamoto, who was more than 7 seconds off the ultimate pace and who complained mid-session that his engine was misfiring.

To see the full times from the F1 2010 Hungarian Grand Prix - Free Practice 1: CLICK HERE.