Melbourne: Three time world champion Sebastian Vettel posted the fastest time in both practice sessions as Red Bull dominated opening practice ahead of the weekend's season-opening Australian Formula One Grand Prix on Friday.
Vettel settled with a best of one minute 25.908 seconds in the afternoon to stake his claim for Sunday's Melbourne race, while Australian Mark Webber completed an emphatic one-two for the champion Red Bull team as main title rivals Ferrari and McLaren struggled.
Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, edged out by Vettel in last year's championship, finished 0.840 secs behind Vettel's fastest lap, while last season's Melbourne winner Jenson Button was well down in 11th place in his McLaren.
Speaking about the practice session, Vettel said, “Overall it was a good day for us. It was pretty seamless and there was no trouble with the car. After all the mileage of testing, it was fun to be out there – this circuit doesn’t get easier, it’s a good challenge. The soft tyre doesn’t last too long, but the harder tyre is a decent race tyre. The weather should be quite changeable tomorrow and, as we can’t predict how much that will impact the tyres and car balance, we need to be ready to change things. Today was a good day and the balance was good, but we need to be ready for what’s coming up.”
Meanwhile Mark Webber said, “It was not a bad day and we got through plenty of information. It was nice to have a bit of sun on the circuit after Barcelona, where we had pretty overcast conditions. We had to correlate a lot of information from Europe and that went pretty well. We still have a huge amount to go through tonight and we’re expecting a bit of overcast stuff tomorrow, so we need to be ready for that. Overall, it was pretty positive for us, but there are still areas to improve on.”
