FE: Buemi and di Grassi lead practice

Sebastien Buemi and Lucas di Grassi shared practice honors for the Formula E season-opening Beijing ePrix, with Renault e.dams favorite for pole position.

The Renault squad dominated the opening session as Buemi improved late on to a 1m36.991s to lead team-mate Nicolas Prost by almost half a second.

In practice two neither driver managed a 200kW lap, after Simona de Silvestro's crashed Andretti Autosport-run Spark SRT_01E brought out the red flags with less than eight minutes remaining.

Prost had just emerged from the pitlane when the session was halted and ended up 2.6s off the pace in fifth as the session was not restarted.

Dragon Racing's Venturi VM200-FE-01s had offered the greatest challenge to Buemi and Prost in first practice, with Loic Duval best of the two drivers and within a second of Buemi's benchmark.

But the Frenchman and team-mate Jerome d'Ambrosio were also denied a 200kW run in the second session, in which di Silvestro's accident compromised the run plans of several teams.

Di Grassi was one of the few drivers to get a clean run at qualifying power in the later session, and made the most of it to best Abt Audi Sport team-mate Daniel Abt by a comfortable margin.

Brazilian di Grassi's benchmark of 1m37.279s was easily the closest the Abt Schaeffler FE01s have been to the early pacesetting Renaults, and they were well clear of Stephane Sarrazin (Venturi) and Antonio Felix da Costa (Aguri) in third and fourth.

Reigning champion Nelson Piquet Jr. finished bottom of the timesheets in the first session after crashing in the pitlane.

An apparent problem with the speed limiter caused his NEXTEC TCR 001 to suddenly accelerate, spinning Piquet into the inside concrete barrier.

It broke the front left corner and with a technical issue on the Brazilian's other car, he failed to emerge again in practice one and racked up just five laps.

Car problems kept him in the pits for the first half of the second session, and his 200kW lap was four seconds off di Grassi's pace.

Originally on Autosport.com