Several sliding isolation systems have been proposed to control earthquake effects. However most of these isolation devices have limited effectiveness under near-fault ground motions due to pulse-type characteristics of such excitations. Recently proposed, VFPI has unique characteristics to overcome the limitations of traditional isolation system for near-fault ground motions. VFPI incorporates isolation, energy dissipation and restoring force mechanisms and has additional advantages due to response-dependent variable frequency of oscillation and bounded restoring force. The device has wide choice of parameters to choose from, as per design requirements. In this paper, behaviour of single storey structures isolated using VFPI subjected to near-fault ground motions have been numerically examined. It is shown that it is possible to increase effectiveness of VFPI by using discretely varying coefficient of friction along sliding surface. Parametric studies have been carried out to critically examine the behaviour of single storey structures isolated with VFPI and FPS system.