Watch Formula 1 | German GP Free Practice 3 Live Streaming

Rubens Barrichello enjoyed a better session in seventh, with Kazuki Nakajima of Williams sandwiched between Renault duo Fernando Alonso and Nelson Piquet Jr behind the Brawn GP driver.

Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen were 12th and 16th for Ferrari, while bottom was Giancarlo Fisichella, who spun his Force India into the barriers after only three timed laps as the track became wet.

Reigning champion Hamilton clocked one minute, 32.149 seconds with only seven minutes left in the session to take over from home favourite Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull.

We have had some wet races and we have not had much in the way of cars that are out of position on the grid and things like that. But actually I was having a look at this very subject the week before last, well, straight after Silverstone. I think that, as I put things together, I could see that give or take a little bit we had achieved a fair bit of what we set out to do.

I think that there is no doubt that the cars can follow a little bit closer. Statistically, if you analyse the races that are worth analysing this year there has been a little bit more overtaking. I think we probably didn’t go as far as we wished or wanted to. We were setting out to try and halve the time difference needed to produce a successful overtake and maybe we haven’t quite got that far. But equally I think – and I don’t know whether Paddy would agree with me – I think we set a very low target for the downforce knowing that once the teams got working on it 24/7 they would rapidly bring that downforce up but I have to say it went up a little bit further than I expected it to which is not condusive to overtaking amongst other things.

Yeah, I agree with Pat. We always need the level of downforce. It was important as obviously that affects the weight more significantly than anything else and the fact that the downforce that has been achieved by the cars this year is significantly higher than anticipated means inevitably that some of the work we did has been eroded in effect.

I think the other factor that is worth bearing in mind, which is quite fundamental, is that as Formula One has become, I would say, more thoroughly professional from end to end and better resourced from end to end on the grid the performances have closed up, so in actual fact the spread of lap time performance from end to end of the grid is about half what it was five years ago. Now if all the cars are that much closer it just means they will always find it more difficult to overtake, so it is quite a difficult problem to crack.