Vettel flying in Hungary

Vettel's headline time at the Hungaroring was a minute 20.087 seconds, almost half a second quicker than that of Ferrari's Alonso.

Red Bull looked set to camp in the top two spots throughout the final 70 minutes, as they had the last hour of free practice one - but Alonso found 0.013s on Webber as the drivers switched to the faster, super-soft rubber in the second half of the session.

Alonso was the only driver capable of threatening Red Bull's hard-tyre benchmarks, set relatively early on, while on softs - with even Felipe Massa in the other Ferrari 0.899s down on the pace-setter by the end.

Webber then came out on his own option tyres and laid down a 1:20.597 before German Vettel appeared to storm to his lightning-quick lap-time.

The gap from the Milton Keynes squad's drivers to the closest competitors was 0.7s for most of the run-out. While far from encouraging, that was an improvement on the one-second advantage they imposed in the morning.

There was little incident in the afternoon. Renault showed their pace with fifth for rookie Vitaly Petrov - whose future the French marque are presently considering - and seventh for Robert Kubica.

Driver's championship leader Lewis Hamilton improved hugely from his 18th-place morning showing to separate them.

His McLaren team-mate Jenson Button - second in the standings - was ninth as the Woking team sought to close the gap on Red Bull. The Britons were 1.221s and 1.643s off Vettel's time respectively.

Nico Hulkenberg of Williams was ahead of reigning champion Button in the timesheets. Michael Schumacher followed in 10th with Mercedes team-mate and fellow German Nico Rosberg 13th.

Heikki Kovalainen ended the session bottom, behind the Virgins and Hispanias, as a hydraulics problem on his Lotus limited him to five laps of running.

There was little improvement by anyone in the final 20 minutes as the teams ran heavy fuel loads with Sunday's race in mind.