To no-one's great surprise, reigning Monaco GP2 winner Pastor Maldonado confirmed his position as the man to beat around the Principality this weekend by setting the pace in Thursday morning's free practice session.
As he had in qualifying in Barcelona last month, the Venezuelan topped the timesheets ahead of Piquet Sports team-mate Andreas Zuber, with Bruno Senna, looking to make up for the misfortune which dogged him in Turkey, third fastest in the 30-minute session.
Maldonado was the first man on track when the green light appeared at the end of pit-lane, and improved with almost every lap he completed, before setting a final time of 1min 21.701secs to take the top spot by almost half a second as his competitors struggled in vain to find a way to stay in touch.
Istanbul feature race winner Giorgio Pantano, Vitaly Petrov, Andy Soucek and Senna all swapped best laps in the first half of the session but, on their second set of tyres, no-one had an answer for the Venezuelan's tumbling times.
Behind Senna, Soucek - now back at DPR in place of the injured Michael Herck - provided some encouragement with fourth spot, ending the session ahead of Karun Chandhok, Pantano, Adrian Valles - going well for BCN - Asia Series champion Romain Grosjean, Barcelona winner Alvaro Parente - who also won the World Series round in Monaco a year ago - and Sebastien Buemi.
Petrov wound up eleventh fastest, one ahead of the returning Christian Bakkerud, while other potential frontrunners such as Luca Filippi, Javi Villa and Kamui Kobayashi had to make do with 14th, 15th and 18th respectively.
![Pastor Maldonado - Piquet Sports [pic credit: GP2 Series]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/443397.jpg)
