McLaren turned the tables on Ferrari in Friday’s second practice session at Fuji, as Lewis Hamilton set the fastest time to head a 1-2 for the Woking squad.

Hamilton, who is clinging on to a wafer-thin two-point lead over Fernando Alonso in the title race, maintained a slight edge over his team-mate throughout the session and finished 0.2s ahead.

Felipe Massa was the Ferrari standard-bearer in third, but trailed Hamilton by some three-quarters of a second.

Morning pacesetter Kimi Raikkonen was relegated to fifth as Jarno Trulli split the Ferraris at the Toyota-owned circuit.

Whereas at most races the front-runners sit out the early stages of practice sessions, this time they wasted no time in getting down to business as they sought to learn more about the unfamiliar track.

After briefly trading the fastest time with Alonso, Hamilton laid down an initial marker of 1m19.978s and the world champion clocked a 1m20.124s.

After 15 minutes Renault’s Giancarlo Fisichella went fastest on soft tyres, only to be immediately demoted by team-mate Heikki Kovalainen even though the Finn was using the medium compound.

It wasn’t long before Hamilton reclaimed the top spot with a 1m19.391s and then improved to 1m19.198s.

Driving very hard and using every inch of available road and a bit more, Lewis went on to eclipse Raikkonen’s morning benchmark by 0.4s with a 1m18.734s lap shortly after the half-hour mark.

Alonso got down to 1m18.948s, while the Ferraris seemingly had no answer to their rivals’ pace.

It wasn’t for the want of trying, Massa in particular looking a little ragged and going off twice on one lap as he sought to extract more speed from the F2007.

There were few improvements in the second half of the session as teams concentrated on race preparation and the track temperature dropped significantly.

Trulli and Raikkonen set almost identical times in fourth and fifth, shuffling the Renaults of Kovalainen and Fisichella back to sixth and seventh.

After struggling for much of the day, David Coulthard vaulted up the order near the end to take eighth for Red Bull ahead of Ralf Schumacher (Toyota) and Robert Kubica (BMW Sauber).

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