Nico Rosberg topped Friday morning's timesheets during the first practice session ahead of Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix.

The German was fastest in all three practices in Melbourne last week in his Williams although he only recorded the fifth best time in qualifying before finishing sixth in the race.

But he shone once again by clocking a lap of one minute 36.260 seconds on his final lap of the session.

Teammate Kazuki Nakajima was just 0.045 secs behind as Williams finished one-two.

Jenson Button, the winner of last week's season opener in Australia, led the standings for much of the session before being bumped off the top by the two Williams drivers.

The Englishman underlined the strong performance of his Brawn GP car with a lap of 1:36.430 that was third best with teammate Rubens Barrichello a further five-hundredths of a second behind in fourth.

Ferrari were looking to bounce back from a disastrous performance in Australia last week and were impressive with Felipe Massa fifth best and Kimi Raikkonen in sixth.

However, the Finn was forced to jump out of his car just before the end of the session after his cockpit extinguisher appeared to go off halfway down the back straight.

Lewis Hamilton shook off his controversial disqualification from the Australian Grand Prix to record the seventh fastest time while the Red Bulls of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel were eighth and ninth respectively.

Timo Glock overcame a spin to record the 10th best time for his Toyota in a session that featured a fair amount of drama, highlighted by Nelson Piquet's wild trip through the gravel at turn six after his Renault ran over a curb.