Hello and welcome to our live coverage of this weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix, starting with an hour-and-a-half of practice.

Join us again for the second session later today, scheduled to start in exactly two-and-a-half hours - 6am UK time.

It was Red Bull's Mark Webber who paced it, followed by Raikkonen, Alonso, Vettel and Rosberg.

And there's the chequered flag as the opening practice session ahead of the Malaysian Grand Prix concludes in Sepang!

Teams aren't willing to change tyres now, so that looks like that for this session. Those cars that are out there are just lapping on old rubbers and they're not going to improve any times.

Williams: "The team gathering lots of valuable data this morning which they will be going over through lunch ahead of #FP2."

Hamilton pits his Mercedes and that should be that for the Briton this session.

Lewis Hamilton on team radio: "My rear tyres are destroyed."

Vettel has reported some vibration in his Red Bull.

Raikkonen, still in second behind Webber, heads back out on his used tyres.

Improvements are unlikely now, with the best of the tyres already seen.

Kevin Eason, F1 correspondent for the Times: "In the news, Marussia-Caterham held merger talks over the winter. Seems like Bernie E is searching for a way to prune to 10 teams."

Hamilton hits the target set by his engineer with a 1m42.737.

Lewis Hamilton's race engineer on team radio: "OK Lewis, target time of [1 min] 42.4s".

So, Webber still tops the timesheets, and the Australian is back out on track looking to improve once more.

Alonso has a moment at Turn 1 and screeches to a halt in a cloud of burnt rubber!

Button goes the quickest he has been today with a 1m38.173, having bolted on a fresh set of hard tyres.

World championship leader Kimi Raikkonen goes second on the charts with a 1m37.003.

Sutil has sustained some damage to his end plate. His engineer tells him: "Easy on the way in Adrian, we look to have front wing damage."

We've got yellow flags after Gutierrez had a spin at Turn 14.

Di Resta moves up to seventh with an effort of 1m37.782. Good stuff from the Scot.