McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton beat Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel to set the pace in an incident-packed first practice at the Singapore Grand Prix.
Hamilton was 0.406 seconds faster than Vettel, who can win the world title on Sunday if the race result goes his way.
The McLaren driver was 1.5secs quicker than Vettel’s team-mate Mark Webber, who was third ahead of Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso.
The session was delayed twice by problems with the circuit’s kerbs.
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The start was postponed by 30 minutes while track workers repaired damage to the kerbs caused by a support race, and that meant the session was shortened to an hour from 90 minutes.
And even that hour was interrupted twice.
The first stop came when Heikki Kovalainen had to stop his Lotus out on track at Turn 18 with a gearbox failure and his right front brake then overheated and caught fire. The incident brought out the red flag to stop the session for five minutes while the car was recovered.
The teams lost more running when practice was stopped with eight minutes to go after another kerb came loose in Turn Seven. BBC Sport
Briton Jenson Button was fifth in the second McLaren ahead of Brazilian Felipe Massa in the second Ferrari, German Adrian Sutil of Force India and his compatriot seven-times champion Michael Schumacher, 42, in the leading Mercedes.
Briton Paul di Resta was ninth for Force India and German Nico Rosberg 10th in the second Mercedes. AFP
Jaime Alguersuari led the next group after posting 1m 53.050s in his Toro Rosso, chased by Pastor Maldonado’s Williams on 1m 53.399s, Sergio Perez and Kamui Kobayashi in their Saubers on 1m 53.703s and 1m 53.749s, Renault’s Bruno Senna on 1m 53.765s, and Toro Rosso’s Sebastien Buemi on 1m 53.785s.
There was another gap to Renault’s Vitaly Petrov on 1m 54.736s, with Jarno Trulli for company on 1m 54.821s, then another gap to Heikki Kovalainen’s sister Lotus on 1m 56.198s, and Jerome d’Ambrosio was Virgin’s faster runner on 1m 57.798s to Timo Glock’s 1m 58.792s.
The HRTs ended up 23rd and 24th with Daniel Ricciardo on 1m 59.169s on his first visit to the track and Narain Karthikeyan returning briefly to post 1m 59.214s. The cars bore messages to the late Christian Bakkerud, the Danish GP2 and F3 driver who died of brain injuries recently following a car accident in the UK. Formula 1
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