Hamilton tops day one in Belgium

With heavy rain putting paid to the final twenty minutes of practice at the legendary Spa Francorchamps Circuit on Friday, Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton emerged as the leader ahead of practice one leader, Kimi Raikkonen, who has just finalized contract talks with the Scuderia for 2018.

Kimi, who led the way in FP1, was just two and half tenths shy of Hamilton's pace while his Scuderia teammate, Sebastian Vettel, was down in fifth, almost half a second down. However, even with Valtteri Bottas third fastest, Mercedes are not sitting on their laurels and are still very wary of the threat that the Italian team presents here this weekend.

The car is working pretty well, the drivers are quite happy with it on a single lap,” said Mercedes man Andrew Shovlin. “The day was obviously affected by the rain at the end of the second session. We were not expecting it early on but then as the session progressed you could see the weather coming in. So we were trying to bring the programme forward a bit, as other teams were too.”

“That has left us missing a bit of tyre data that we would normally have. We had new power units in the car which have been signed off well and we also brought our low-downforce package for this circuit which has performed in line with expectations. Overall, the drivers are reasonably pleased with the car but there are a few more unknowns than normal. We will work hard overnight to try and improve the car and fix the few issues that we've found in terms of the handling today.”

Max Verstappen was a pleasing fourth for Red Bull with the legions of orange clad fans screaming encouragement everytime he appeared on track. The Red Bull duo were running different levels of rear wing throughout the day, and teammate Daniel Ricciardo finished in sixth overall behind Vettel.

Hulkenberg, Ocon, Sainz and Palmer rounded out the top ten.

It was a bad day for Felipe Massa, who smashed his Williams into the barriers early in FP1 and the team were unable to repair the damage in time for FP2.

Fernando Alonso finished 11^th overall, but had been complaining of a lack of power for the majority of the day.