Vettel leads the way in practice, as Hamilton predicts tough race

In the morning session Vettel outpaced teammate Mark Webber of Australia, while in the afternoon laps the German driver repeated his dominant performance and was quicker than Ferrari's Fernando Alonso by 0.49 seconds. "This morning didn't really give a clear picture of each team's pace, but this afternoon it was tighter," Vettel said. "It's a difficult track here, quite bumpy and rough, but the car feels good."

Red Bull and Ferrari alternated the other top places in the afternoon, with Webber third ahead of Ferrari's Felipe Massa - back at the scene where he suffered near-fatal skull fractures in a qualifying crash last year.

"It was just normal to go back on the track," Massa said. "It was nice to be back after what happened last year but I didn't think about it when I was in the car."

Alonso said Saturday's sessions - a third practice and qualifying - would show more clearly the teams' strengths and weaknesses than these initial laps around the Hungaroring's twisting and relatively slow design. "It's only Friday," the Spaniard said in the Ferrari paddock. "All the teams have tried different things and we don't really know how much faster the others may be than us."

Alonso said Ferrari's main objective this weekend was to finish ahead of McLaren, who lead the team and the drivers' championships. "First of all we'll try to reduce the difference with McLaren and then see if in a few races we can cut the gap to less than 25 points, a one-race difference," Alonso said.

Among the teams, McLaren has 300 points, Red Bull is second with 272, and Ferrari third with 208. Lewis Hamilton is the top driver with 157 points after 11 races. Teammate Jenson Button, the defending world champion, is second with 143 points. Red Bull drivers Vettel and Webber each have 136 points and Alonso, the only other contender in triple digits, has 123.

In other afternoon placings, Renault's Vitaly Petrov of Russia headed off Hamilton for fifth, while the other Renault of Poland's Robert Kubica was seventh. Button was ninth. While Hamilton has two wins and two second-place finishes in the last five races, he was fourth at the German GP last week and Button fifth. Hamilton won the Hungarian race in 2007 and 2009 but said Red Bull and Ferrari seemed to have built an insurmountable edge recently. "This weekend they're even faster and we've not made any steps in the last couple of weekends," Hamilton said.