Hamilton relishing close fight in Australia

Lewis Hamilton says he is "excited" by the fierce competition for honours behind him after topping the timesheets in each of Friday's practice sessions for the Australian Grand Prix. The world champion was just a tenth of a second ahead of second-place Max Verstappen in FP2.

The Dutchman also more than held a candle to Hamilton on long-run pace too as Mercedes and Red bull appear to have little separating them in the season-opener.

Sebastian Vettel was half a second down on Hamilton's top time, but the Ferrari man is confident that they have more time to extract over the weekend, having turned a similar deficit at the same point in this event last year into a race victory come the Sunday.

Hamilton has won three of the last four drivers' titles, but has spoken regularly about relishing the challenge in 2018.

"Coming to the first race, you really have no idea what it's going to be like," he said.

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"You don't how you're going to feel physically, you don't know how the tyres are going to react to the circuit.

"But we started on the right foot today, we got through everything we needed.

"It closed up a little bit in FP2 in terms of the gap between us all, but that's exciting. It's more challenging for me to try and eke out a little more from the car."

Pirelli's ultrasoft tyres are grippier than anything teams had available last season and Hamilton said the new-found levels of speed were "insane".

He explained: "The tyres definitely didn't seem to have the same issue that we had in Barcelona where they were blistering, so it felt a lot more normal.

"Obviously the car is quicker here than it was last year, so it feels better everywhere. Turns 11 and 12 are crazy, we're not even braking into that corner, it's insane."