The newcomers and developing nations were joined in the opening practice session by the USA and India, as the teams had yet to complete the same amount of testing mileage as their rivals, and Karthikeyan made the most of the outing by topping the timesheets with a 1min 16.710secs effort as his team began to make up for time lost after missing the season-opener at Zandvoort.

As well as allowing India and the USA in the rookie sessions to increase there testing mileage, there were also two hours of additional running for them and Great Britain, which only received its car in the days before it had to freighted to China. Despite that, Watts - who had prior experience of the Ferrari machine - topped the first session of the day.

“We have a good set-up at this early stage," he revealed, "We're not really worried too much about lap time, as we just want to make sure we have the car set-up correctly and make sure everything is okay.”

Team Mexico's David Garza also got his first taste of the new A1GP car although, as his own car was still not ready, he completed the early sessions in the Team Switzerland machine that went on to top the times at the end of the day. The Mexican team has also been allocated additional running on Saturday.

Switzerland's own rookie, Alexandre Imperatori, was third quickest with a car that looked to be handling well over Chengdu's bumps, but his session wasn't without its moments, as he needed to pull off at least one save as he got into a slide coming into a tight hairpin.

Brazil's Felipe Guimaraes was fourth, ahead of New Zealand's Chris van der Drift, while Ireland's Niall Quinn had a fraught session, spinning three times in the first half hour.

“The rookie session this morning was very good and we did some good times and made some positive changes to the car," Guimaraes noted, "In the afternoon, I ran new tyres but, on my fast lap, someone spun in front of me, so I could not improve on my time, otherwise it would have been better. The track is very bumpy and there are a lot of corners so we just have to keep working hard on the set-up and make the most of our last practice tomorrow before qualifying.”