Hungarian GP Friday Practice 1

The German was joined at the top of the time sheets by Ferrari team mate, Rubens Barrichello.

In contrast, neither of the McLaren-Mercedes drivers set a time. Midway through the session, both David Coulthard and Mika Hakkinen did one out lap and returned directly to the pits.

Almost 20 minutes of the session had passed before a time was set as 15 of the 20 drivers had simply completed out laps in order to run system checks. Eddie Irvine was the first man out on the circuit but he did not set his fastest time of 1m21.308s until his sixth and final lap - a time which left him third at the end of the session.

Ralf Schumacher spent much of the session at the sharp end and eventually put his Williams-BMW in fourth place 1.2s behind brother Michael. The BAR-Honda of Jacques Villeneuve was fifth fastest after the Canadian completed the most laps of the whole field at 18. Jarno Trulli rounded out the top six in his Jordan Mugen-Honda.

Both Jean Alesi and Alex Wurz were both fit enough to compete after tests by FIA medical delegate professor Sid Watkins. Wurz was 12th fastest, .0.5s adrift of Benetton team mate Giancarlo Fisichella. Alesi meanwhile only managed 16th place was pushing his Prost-Peugeot to the limit with a spectacular four-wheel slide on the final corner of his fastest lap.

Full times, click here.