iSport International also continued its recent good form, with both drivers in the top six as Karun Chandhok headed Monaco race winner Bruno Senna in fifth and sixth, ahead of Grosjean, Maldonado's Piquet Sports team-mate Zuber, DAMS' Jerome d'Ambrosio and series returnee Lucas di Grassi, who completed his first day back in harness - now with Barwa Campos International in place of Ben Hanley - by rounding out the top ten.
The Brazilian, who finished last season as runner-up to eventual champion
Timo Glock, ended the session by posting a sub-1min 13secs lap - only to see it cancelled after it was shown that he had cut the chicane. The decision was a key one with the top twelve cars all posting times within one second of Villa's best.
Only 23 drivers participated in the morning session, with BCN's Adrian Valles absent to conduct his Le Mans 24 Hours build-up with the Epsilon Euskadi team and Durango's Davide Valsecchi still recovering from the heavy shunt he sustained in Turkey. GP2 'supersub' Andy Soucek duly conducted BCN's testing alone, with Milos Pavlovic still absent from the Spanish team's line-up, while FMS International ran only Roldan Rodriguez. The team then announced that it had signed reigning British F3 champion Marko Asmer to replace stand-in Adam Carroll for the remainder of the year, and the Estonian duly took his first laps after lunch.
Maldonado was fastest during the morning session, closely followed by Senna, Zuber and Villa, with Chandhok rounding out the top five, as series organisers introduced a series of development ideas to the new Dallaras.
“This morning, we tested four different engine and gearbox strategy upgrades on four different cars," technical director Didier Perrin commented, "As we are very satisfied with the results, we tried them on a larger number of cars this afternoon in order to obtain a common strategy which we will validate on all cars tomorrow.”
![Javier Villa - Racing Engineering [pic credit: GP2 Media]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/410942.jpg)
