Manor Motorsport's Kohei Hirate proved quickest in opening free practice for the Macau Grand Prix, outpacing Prema Powerteam's Roberto Streit by 0.545secs.

Hirate put in the best time on his final lap of practice, as most drivers spent the session acclimatising to the challenging Guia street circuit before picking up their pace and posting their fastest laps as the chequered flag was readied.

Kazuki Nakajima, who ended last week with a deal to test for Williams in F1 and race for DAMS in GP2, was third quickest, again with his final lap, which was just three-thousandths of a second slower than Streit, the Brazilian who races regularly in the Japanese F3 series.

British F3 champion Mike Conway had topped the times for most of the session, making the most of his experience of the circuit from last year, but was demoted to fourth overall after a flurry of quick times right at the flag.

Adrian Sutil, the Japanese F3 champion, ended the session fifth overall and admitted that he had fallen in love with the track.

"It is awesome, almost unbelievable," the Spyker MF1 tester enthused, "I am still adjusting to driving here, and think there is a lot more to come from me. Getting a good slipstream here is important - it can be worth about one second - so it will be important to be quite clever for qualifying."

Carlin Motorsport's Sebastian Vettel was thankful to just get some laps under his belt after spending most of the first 20 minutes of the session in the pits as his mechanics worked to resolve an engine problem.

"It wasn't running properly, but we managed to fix it," said Vettel, who eventually ended up eighth overall, "At least I got out on the track, because things could have been worse. And, for the few laps I did, the car feels okay."

The session was relatively incident-free, although Daisuke Ikeda ended up backwards in the barriers at Lisboa after being spun around by another car, and Kazuya Oshima damaged his front left corner after swiping the barriers at R Bend.