Abu Dhabi GP Practice One: Hamilton heads Rosberg as Merc set strong early pace

World Championship leader Lewis Hamilton set the early pace ahead of rival Nico Rosberg in opening practice for the Abu Dhabi GP on Friday.

Hamilton, who leads Rosberg by 17 points in the drivers' standings, lapped the 5.554km track in a time of 1:43.476s to go 0.133s faster than the German. 

Were that result to repeat itself on Sunday then Hamilton would take the title, although the Briton only needs to finish second behind his Mercedes team-mate to be assured a repeat of his 2008 success.

Certainly on the evidence of P1 performance it looks as though victory of F1's first double points finale will go to one Mercedes driver or the other - either of which would bode well for Hamilton.

The gap to the third fastest car, Fernando Alonso's Ferrari, was a massive 1.708s - although the suspicion is that the hole might be Williams-shaped after their running was truncated.

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Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa were running third and fifth fastest during the early stages but both FW36s then suffered identical bodywork failures almost simultaneously.

Massa’s car arrived back in the pits with its right sidepod flapping loose while Bottas’ lost the same piece of bodywork out on track.

The Finn returned to the pits where both cars remained for the rest of the session. “We’re just running a new cooling configuration,” smiled a rueful Pat Symonds, Williams’ Chief Technical Officer. “It hasn’t worked too well.”

Williams' Head of Vehicle Performance Rob Smedley added to Sky Sports F1 after the session: "We’ve understood what went wrong and what we need to do, so we’ll be out in the next session. It’s not so much a [new] package, it’s a different configuration of the package we’ve been running since Japan.

"We’ve never actually run in this configuration before, but we’ve understood what the problem is – we’ve got a slight difference in pressure underneath the bodywork and on top of the bodywork that we haven’t seen before – so we’ll just go back to what we ran in the last race and the races before that and it’ll be fine."

With Alonso third, his replacement at Ferrari next season, Sebastian Vettel, was P4 ahead of Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo.

Toro Rosso pair Daniil Kvyat and Jean-Eric Vergne were sixth and seventh respectively, with Bottas eventually eighth ahead of Force India’s Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg. Massa finished 13th.

Kevin Magnussen was 11th in what proved a difficult session for McLaren. Certainly that was the case for team-mate Jenson Button, whose running was ended by an unspecified car problem.

Neither was there much sign of the new front wing McLaren are planning to debut this weekend. Designed by Peter Prodromou, who rejoined the team from Red Bull in September, it appeared briefly on Magnussen’s car with Button not scheduled to use it until Saturday. 

Meanwhile, debutant Will Stevens made a stuttering start to his F1 career. Driving the second Caterham, he spent a prolonged period in their garage after the car's engine overrevved on its installation lap.

Stevens took to the track eventually, however, and ended the session 20th and last, about 7s off Hamilton's pace.

"It [an F1 car] is different, but the single-seater categories outside of Formula 1 have got that fast that the actual laptime between those [cars] isn't huge," the Briton told Sky F1. "Obviously here it's a lot more complicated and we've got a lot more things to do but the main focus is to get all of the procedures right, make sure I learn as much as I can and then push on as the weekend progresses.

“Coming here for the last meeting of the year is difficult – you’re jumping in at the deep end – but when you get an opportunity like this you need to take it with both hands and make it count.”

Making their own practice debuts, Esteban Ocon was 16th for Lotus while Adderly Fong was 19th in the Sauber.