Pierre Gasly has set a target for his rivals to match by taking the top spot in this morning's Free Practice session in Budapest, setting the pace for almost the entire session to come home almost half a second ahead of Alex Lynn and Sergey Sirotkin.

The Red Bull tester stopped the clocks at 1:27.138 a third of the way through the session, beating his own top time to extend the gap back to his rivals in scorching conditions at the Hungaroring: with track temperatures increasing throughout there was little chance for the rest of the field to improve their lap times, and attention was turned to fine tuning the cars for tomorrow's race.

The entire grid were straight out on track as the session commenced under blue skies: an overnight shower made little impact as the circuit was completely dry, and earlier clouds were burnt away as temperatures soared. Gasly set the first competitive lap 7 minutes in before improving on it two laps later: Sirotkin briefly claimed the top spot but was knocked back off the perch by Gasly when he completed his lap right behind the Russian, and the fight for first was over, with Lynn the only man to improve substantially in the second half of the session by claiming P2 with 2 minutes remaining.

A number of drivers went wide at Turns 1 and 11 as they looked for the limits, but the only incident of note was when Sergio Canamasas spun at Turn 12 before getting back underway once again: the Spaniard finished the session in the Top ten behind Raffaele Marciello, Nobuharu Matsushita, Norman Nato, Oliver Rowland, Antonio Giovinazzi and Luca Ghiotto, all of whom will be looking to close the gap to Gasly in this afternoon's Qualifying session.

1. Pierre Gasly PREMA Racing 1:27.138
2. Alex Lynn DAMS 1:27.595
3. Sergey Sirotkin ART Grand Prix 1:27.656
4. Raffaele Marciello RUSSIAN TIME 1:27.860
5. Nobuharu Matsushita ART Grand Prix 1:27.878
6. Norman Nato Racing Engineering 1:27.951
7. Oliver Rowland MP Motorsport 1:28.093
8. Antonio Giovinazzi PREMA Racing 1:28.255
9. Luca Ghiotto Trident 1:28.270
10. Sergio Canamasas Carlin 1:28.416
11. Artem Markelov RUSSIAN TIME 1:28.420
12. Jordan King Racing Engineering 1:28.453
13. Marvin Kirchhöfer Carlin 1:28.460
14. Arthur Pic Rapax 1:28.480
15. Nicholas Latifi DAMS 1:28.570
16. Gustav Malja Rapax 1:28.658
17. Sean Gelael Pertamina Campos Racing 1:28.730
18. Mitch Evans Pertamina Campos Racing 1:28.778 18
19 Daniël de Jong MP Motorsport 1:28.782
20. Philo Paz Armand Trident 1:29.204
21. Nabil Jeffri Arden International 1:29.514
22. Jimmy Eriksson Arden International 1:29.777