Melbourne winners struggle with handling.

Australian Grand Prix winner Giancarlo Fisichella was not a happy man after the opening practice sessions for this weekend's Malaysian round, claiming that the Renault that performed so well in Melbourne was more of a handful at Sepang.

The Italian, along with team-mate Fernando Alonso, completed a solid first day's work for the regie at Sepang, with both one-hour sessions centring on tyre evaluation for Sunday's race. However, despite the programme being completed, neither driver was happy with the way his car handled.

"The car was quick on the first lap, but then began oversteering too much, which made it hard to set consistent times on the runs," Fisichella reported, "Both tyre types seemed quite similar in performance, and we will have to analyse our data carefully this evening in order to make the right selection. There is still work to do tomorrow morning to find the best set-up for the race."

The handling trait may not have been entirely down to the tyres, however, as engineering director Pat Symonds explained that the prevailing tropical conditions made oversteer a necessary evil.

"Neither car is particularly well balanced at this stage but, in Malaysia, we always need to tune the car set-up in order to counteract the fact that, in high temperatures, the cars are inherently more prone to oversteer," he said, "Our tyre evaluations were somewhat compromised by traffic and lots of yellow flags, but we will nevertheless be able to get the information we need from them to choose our tyres, although we will carry out some fine tuning tomorrow morning."