Piquet relieved to get full day's running

Piquet, who failed to finish on his debut in Australia having been consigned to the last row of the grid, was seventh quickest in first practice in Malaysia, and matched his Renault team-mate Fernando Alonso to within a tenth of a second in both sessions.

"I did a lot of laps today and I was able to complete the planned programme which has really made a big difference," he said. "The fact that I know the circuit also helps and I have learned a lot and feel comfortable.

"I hope that things continue like this until Sunday as I was happy with the behaviour of the car. There is still a lot to do, but overall the result of this first day is most encouraging."

Double world champion Alonso, who scored his first win for McLaren in Malaysia twelve months ago, had a more complicated start to his Sepang weekend and ran into gearbox problems in the afternoon session.

"It was hot today for the first day of work and I had a problem with my gearbox this afternoon which disturbed my programme a bit, but we still managed to continue and finished this first day with some interesting data in view of the qualifying session tomorrow," he said. We will try and analyse that this evening in order to make the most of the last practice session tomorrow.

"To improve our performance level in qualifying is always our objective and we are working hard on this area."

The team's executive director of engineering Pat Symonds said he anticipated there was more to come from his drivers in qualifying after they ended the second Friday session 14th and 15th fastest.

"Fernando experienced a gearbox problem and he was unable to use second gear, which is quite a penalty around Sepang," he said. "In view of the new gearbox regulations, we decided that, even though this was a test gearbox, we would leave it on and continue running to see what happened. Before the end of the session the gearbox failed completely.

"Nelson had a solid day learning the circuit, and his early performance was very good. However, our emphasis today was to develop both him and the car, and so we chose to use the tyres in a way that would give us optimum learning, as opposed to optimum lap times."