Vettel suffers in Friday practice

Defending Formula One World champion Sebastian Vettel missed the second practice session of the day following a heavy crash in first practice.

Sebastian Vettel brought out the red flag early this morning in a rain affected practice session, the Red Bull driver ran wide on turn eight which immediately turned the German into the barriers, severely damaging his beloved nicknamed Kinky Kyle.

The damage sustained forced Vettel to completely miss the second session, which of course means he will now head into Saturday with the disadvantage of not having had any dry running time under his belt.

'It was one of those things. We were keen to look at the intermediate tyres but as he went out the rain increased.' Red Bull Team principal Christian Horner told the BBC.

He continued: 'He was just unlucky and unfortunately it did quite a bit of damage. He managed to hit about every corner of the car. It just caught him out.

'The team have plenty to do this evening. Sebastian missed out on a lot of running time.'

Due to the rain, teams didn't do a large amount of running in first practice, but did do enough to gain experience from running Pirelli's wet weather tyres in competition conditions for the first time.

Some interesting comments coming from Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso who appeared to indicate that Pirelli's grip window on the wet tyres was around five laps, before the ultimate performance dropped away.

Overall the former two-time F1 world champion completed 13 laps, the best of which was 1minute 38.670 seconds which was enough to head the timing sheets ahead of Mercedes duo of Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher.

Renault took fourth (Nick Heidfeld) and fifth (Vitaly Petrov) ahead of an impressive Kamui Kobayashi in sixth and Massa's Ferrari in seventh.

Mark Webber completed 5 laps, which was only good enough for eleventh, while Vettel's 4 laps placed him seventeenth overall.

McLaren hardly ran, Jenson Button completing 4 laps, none of which being competitive, while Lewis Hamilton didn't set a time at all.

McLaren went on to hit back in the second dry session with Jenson Button topping the timing sheets with a time of 1minute 26.456 seconds, Lewis Hamilton was third fastest 0.577 behind, with both drivers completing a good amount of running with Button completing 26 laps and Hamilton completing 31 laps.

'I had a quiet morning - lots of tea - but this afternoon we did high fuel and low fuel running but it's difficult to get a balance around here.' Button told the BBC, while Hamilton added: 'I initially struggled a little bit with set-up, which we can look at and fix overnight, but I was really pleased with my long-run pace - I think it was probably one of the best practice long-runs I've ever had.'

The amount of long runs McLaren achieved will only compound Vettel's frustration with his crash in the first session.

Vettel will now be reliant on the data received by his Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber who completed 31 laps during the second session, setting a best time of 1minute 27.149 seconds, 0.693 seconds behind Button in fifth.

It was a another good session for Mercedes in FP2 with Nico Rosberg second, fractionally behind Button (0.065 seconds) and Michael Schumacher fourth.

Fernando Alonso, who topped the first session had a frustrating second session with a hydraulic problem keeping him in the garage for some of the session eventually running 27 laps and posting a time of 1minute 28.069seconds which placed him behind team-mate Felipe Massa in eleventh.

Towards the rear of the field and following a good showing by Kobayashi in the first session, he will be slightly disappointed to have been beaten by Lotus driver Jarno Trulli.

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