Webber, Vettel top Friday times at Silverstone

Mark Webber missed the last 15 minutes of today's second practice session at the British Grand Prix due to electrical problems, but it didn't matter: no one could better the Red Bull-Renault driver's time in that last quarter hour.

Mark Webber, Red Bull Racing.

Photo by xpb.cc.

"A pretty good day apart from the electrical problem at the end, which was a shame, lost a few laps," Webber summed up his day. "The car seems to be going pretty well here otherwise -- I think a the other teams were sandbagging a bit, but we're happy with our programme and looking forward to qualifying."

Ferrari's Fernando Alonso was second fastest in the afternoon, after both of the Scuderia cars languished in the midfield in the morning session. In the afternoon, though, the two-time World Champion was just 0.392 seconds behind Webber, and his teammate Felipe Massa was fourth, 0.865 seconds off Webber's pace.

"I expected to be competitive because our car is much better than it was at the Turkish Grand Prix, which was the last time we raced at a track with similar characteristics to this one," Alonso said. "As expected, Red Bull is very strong and therefore the big favourite for tomorrow's qualifying and behind them, we will fight it out with McLaren, Renault and maybe also Mercedes: nothing different there to Valencia."

Sebastian Vettel, Webber's Red Bull teammate, was fastest in the morning session, but dropped back to third place in the afternoon as he spun his Red Bull and damaged a set of tires. Still, the rising star of Germany was just 0.249 seconds behind Alonso, and 0.224 ahead of the second Ferrari of Felipe Massa.

"The sessions were okay today," Vettel said. "In the afternoon I had a bit of a spin and flat-spotte a set of hard tyres. We also had a problem with the brake pedal, but nothing big. The pace of the car was good."

Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher scored fifth- and sixth-best times for Mercedes, indicating a huge improvement over the German team's disastrous results in Valencia two weeks ago. Rosberg was just under a second behind Webber, and beath his seven-time World Champion teammate by half a second in today's second practice session.

Vitaly Petrov was a surprise seventh for Renault, the young Russian outdistancing the team's #1 driver, RObert Kubica, by 0.274 seconds. Lewis Hamilton (McLaren-Mercedes), Adrian Sutil (Force India-Mercedes) and Rubens Barrichello (Williams-Cosworth) completed the top ten.