Hamilton fights back in Malaysia

Sepang : Lewis Hamilton turned the tables on world championship leader Nico Rosberg, giving himself a badly-needed boost with the fastest lap in second free practice Friday for the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Rosberg has been in dominant form over the past three races, winning them all to turn a 19-point deficit into an eight-point lead in the title race.

But his Mercedes team-mate and the reigning world champion Hamilton lapped the 5.543km of the Sepang circuit in 1min 34.944sec on his soft-tyre qualifying simulation run, 0.244sec quicker than the German.

With the sun heating the newly laid track to a blistering 58 degrees Celsius (136 Fahrenheit), Hamilton proved most adept at getting the best from his tyres in the harsh conditions.

Hamilton surprisingly also went faster on the hard tyres that must be used for at least one stint during Sunday's race than Rosberg managed on the supposedly quicker medium compound.

After losing more than half of his set-up time to mechanical problems in practice two weeks ago in Singapore, Hamilton would have been delighted to get two almost completely untroubled sessions under his belt on Friday.

He managed to clock up 35 largely untroubled laps during the afternoon with Rosberg running for one lap further.

Ferrari were the next best in the classification, with last year's winner Sebastian Vettel third fastest in 1:35.605 followed by Kimi Raikkonen.