Rosberg fastest as Mercedes dominates opening practice session

Nico Rosberg set the fastest time of the first practice session for the Australian Grand Prix ahead of Lewis Hamilton. After the two Mercedes cars came Valtteri Bottas in third but he was over a second behind Rosberg and Hamilton. After Bottas came Carlos Sainz of Toro Rosso who came in an impressive fourth ahead of his first F1 race and Sebastian Vettel was fifth in his first race weekend for Ferrari. 17 year old Max Verstappen also set an impressive sixth place ahead of his first F1 race.

The practice session was relatively incident free however both the Sauber and Manor teams did not get out of the pits. Sauber is in the middle of a legal battle regarding Giedo van der Garde and the Manor team is still trying to get its cars running due to a software issue. Lotus driver Romain Grosjean did not get any serious running in as well as he only set five laps throughout the session.

McLaren had a difficult session as the two drivers combined to set just 13 laps due to a "small mechanical issue with a power-unit component." This is very worrying for the team as they struggled with reliability all through testing and need to get laps in to learn more about the car and engine. Overall it looks like Mercedes is as dominant as people thought they were and it looks like they will only be able to beat themselves this weekend.

Friday 1st Practice Results

Pos	Driver	Car	Time	Gap	Laps
1	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	1m29.557s	-	19
2	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	1m29.586s	0.029s	19
3	Valtteri Bottas	Williams-Mercedes	1m30.748s	1.191s	20
4	Carlos Sainz Jr.	Toro Rosso-Renault	1m31.014s	1.457s	32
5	Sebastian Vettel	Ferrari	1m31.029s	1.472s	13
6	Max Verstappen	Toro Rosso-Renault	1m31.067s	1.510s	31
7	Felipe Massa	Williams-Mercedes	1m31.188s	1.631s	19
8	Kimi Raikkonen	Ferrari	1m31.310s	1.753s	14
9	Pastor Maldonado	Lotus-Mercedes	1m31.451s	1.894s	22
10	Daniel Ricciardo	Red Bull-Renault	1m31.570s	2.013s	9
11	Daniil Kvyat	Red Bull-Renault	1m32.073s	2.516s	18
12	Sergio Perez	Force India-Mercedes	1m32.247s	2.690s	22
13	Nico Hulkenberg	Force India-Mercedes	1m32.261s	2.704s	19
14	Jenson Button	McLaren-Honda	1m34.542s	4.985s	6
15	Kevin Magnussen	McLaren-Honda	1m34.785s	5.228s	7
16	Romain Grosjean	Lotus-Mercedes	2m17.782s	48.225s	5
17	Marcus Ericsson	Sauber-Ferrari	No Time		0
18	Felipe Nasr	Sauber-Ferrari	No Time		0
19	Will Stevens	Manor-Ferrari	No Time		0
20	Roberto Merhi	Manor-Ferrari	No Time		0