McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton ended the first day of running at the top of the timesheets in Melbourne this evening, clocking a time of 1m25.801s early in the weather-disrupted second practice session. Occasional rain over the course of the 90 minutes forced teams to switch to the intermediate Bridgestone tyre, although some drivers opted to stay indoors during the rain.

A first shower at the very start of the session resulted in a 15-minute lull in the action, after which Williams’ Rubens Barrichello set the inital benchmark at 1m31.006s. Hülkenberg, Rosberg and Button all took over top spot in following ten minutes, before Lewis Hamilton clocked his 1m25.801s just minutes before the second shower arrived.

With the track not wet enough for the intermediate tyres and not dry enough for slicks, there was little action until Toro Rosso’s Jaime Alguersuari ventured out to test the conditions with 40 minutes gone. Although the rain eventually stopped, it took another half an hour for the action to pick up, with drivers returning to the track on slicks.

However, with the rain returning with ten minutes to go, laptimes never recovered to those clocked early in the session, helping Hamilton to keep his top spot. Team-mate Jenson Button finished second on a 1m26.076s, with the Woking-based team focusing on one-lap pace after a poor qualifying performance in Bahrain. Home hero Mark Webber finished third (1m26.248s), with Michael Schumacher (1m26.511s) and Vitaly Petrov (1m26.732s) rounding out the top 5.

At the other end of the field, Lucas Di Grassi, Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna all failed to set laptimes due to reliability problems. Meanwhile Timo Glock completed limited mileage in his Virgin racer after losing tracktime to an unspecified leak.

Despite the slippery conditions, most drivers managed to keep their cars on-track, the only exceptions being Jaime Alguersuari and Sébastien Buemi who went onto the grass at turn 15 and Sebastian Vettel who spun at turn 5 after putting a tyre on the grass under braking.

Here are the results of first practice,

Here are the results of second practice,