Lewis Hamilton beat Sebastian Vettel to set the pace at the first Singapore Grand Prix practice session. 

Click here to see how Vettel can win the title this weekend.

The McLaren driver was 0.406 faster than Vettel, a pattern he will hope continues for the rest of the weekend.

The practice session certainly wasn’t without incident. It was delayed by 30 minutes to begin with while track workers repaired damage to the circuit.

This meant the session was reduces to an hour and during this time there were two further delays.

First Heikki Kovalainen’s Team Lotus car caught fire (not for the first time at Singapore – see here) on Turn 18 when his right front brake overheated after a gearbox failure.

After this red flag incident, there was a further delay when another kerb on the track came loose. These are problems that will need to be non existent on race day of course.

Away from the delays though, it was Hamilton that set the pace ahead of Vettel, Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso.

After watching his team use a new rear wing in this session, McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh said: “We enjoy winning and I think we can be competitive, we have some new parts on the car, we have six races left and we’d like to win them.”

“Both the drivers are motivated and I think we can do a decent job. Lewis is quite relaxed and I think he’s very determined. He has had a difficult season, and he did everything he could to try to stay out of trouble at the last race.”

“I told him that was a very disciplined drive but I would like the old Lewis back.”

The second practice session gets underway at 2.30pm.

If you are looking forward to the Singapore Grand Prix, our build is well underway with a classic video and our in depth preview!

There is also our latest news ahead of the race with Christian Horner singing the praises of Sebastian Vettel and Bruno Senna on chasing points this weekend.

Also, if you fancy a sarcastic look at the world of Formula 1, you should read out latest Talking A Good Game feature.

Finally, if you fancy a free £25 bet on Formula 1 (why wouldn’t you?)  sign up to 188bet here NOW!

embedded by Embedded Video

Related posts: