Macau GP: Sette Camara leads opening practice

The Brazilian, who finished third in the blue ribband F3 event last year and took fastest lap in 2005, steadily built up his speed through the relatively incident-free 45 minute practice session.

With teammates Joel Eriksson and Daniel Ticktum having traded the top spot early on, Sette Camara’s best lap of 2m14.808 seconds with five minutes to go secured the top spot by just more than one tenth of a second.

Although aware that it was still early days, Sette Camara said that it was important to have got his weekend off to a positive start.

“It is really important here to build up momentum and confidence,” he said. “So although everyone steps up for qualifying, being at the top after first practice is a good start.

“I’m happy with the car and I must say that the track feels a bit easier to drive this year. A lot of the bumps have gone – and it is so smooth it feels like a carpet in places.”

Eriksson ended up second overall, just 0.079 seconds ahead of Ticktum, and managed to escape unscathed after a spectacular sideways moment at Fishermen’s Bend nearly resulted in him hitting the wall.

Another man having a wild moment was European F3 champion Lando Norris, who had just flown in from the cancelled F1 tyre test in Brazil. He had a big slide at Lisboa on his final run but kept it out of the wall, as he ended up seventh overall.

The only serious incident came shortly before the end of the session when Dragon crashed into the tyre barriers at Curva do Posta.