Singapore Practice 1 results

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.

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.

A bolt was left sticking up in the air after Felipe Massa's Ferrari ran wide over the kerbs on the exit of that corner, which is at the end of the track's longest straight.

The problems with the kerbs will cause concerns for race director Charlie Whiting, who will need to find a way to ensure they do not recur in qualifying on Saturday or the race on Sunday.

Once the session got under way, lap times tumbled quickly as the cars cleaned up the track, which is shaped from Singapore's roads.

Massa set the early pace, 0.6secs ahead of Webber, while Massa's team-mate Alonso was on a lap that was half a second faster than the Brazilian but he aborted it to come into the pits.

Webber then needlessly damaged his front wing in a collision with Virgin's Timo Glock - who appeared not to see him as the Australian tried to dive down the inside from a long way back into the quick double right-hander that ends the lap.

Button then eclipsed Massa's time by a second before Vettel went 0.9secs quicker than the McLaren.

Hamilton limited his running in the first part of the session, but came out towards the end to comfortably eclipse Vettel's time.

The German went out again at the end of the session following the final interruption but was not able to improve - although he did set the fastest time in the final sector.

Although his rivals are resigned to the fact that Vettel will win the title sooner or later, Ferrari and McLaren are still determined to beat him as often as possible in the remaining six races.

McLaren have a new rear wing here, and Ferrari a new front wing as they continue to develop their cars.

McLaren team principal 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."

Second practice starts at 1430 BST.

source: bbc sport