First practice round-up

Honda’s Anthony Davidson has topped today’s first practice session for the Australian Grand Prix ahead of Red Bull Racing’s Robert Doornbos. In a session in which only 18 drivers set lap times, it was the Honda of Anthony Davidson which emerged on top as the fastest driver on track. The Briton set a quickest lap of 1:28.259 in the latter stages of the session to improve on what had been his previous session-topping time to further increase the gap to second placed driver Robert Doornbos to a third of a second.

Doornbos himself was enjoying his highest ranked session in his Formula One career, setting a lap time of 1:28.559 in the Red Bull Racing car to wind up second. He was followed in the standings by Jacques Villeneuve in the BMW and Kimi Raikkonen’s McLaren. Fifth was Felipe Massa for Ferrari ahead of the brothers Schumacher in sixth and seventh with Michael pipping Ralf to the better lap time, while Alex Wurz stopped the clocks with the eighth fastest time. Ninth fastest was Robert Kubica whose BMW expired crossing the start-finish line half way through the session, as Christian Klein rounded out the top ten for Red Bull.

Once again, the Renault F1 Team chose not to strain their engines too hard in the opening practice session. Both Giancarlo and Fernando set just two reconnaissance laps each, with no tangible time to compare against the other drivers. And out of the 28 cars, only three failed to go out at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly given what appeared to be the fragility of their engines in Malaysia, neither Williams driver ventured out, and the pair were joined in their non-activity by Honda’s Jenson Button.

The second session begins in a matter of hours, and by the end of today we should have a better idea of who has the ultimate pace around this tricky and still slippery circuit.