Nelson Piquet Jr emerged as the pacesetter on day one of the final GP2 Series group test at Paul Ricard, but not before the fastest man in the morning session had all his times deleted. source: crash.net Piquet improved the day's best lap by four-tenths of a second to come out on top of the 24 pilots in action, but the real talking point was the series' decision to scrub all of Jose Maria's laps after his Super Nova car was found to contravene the weight regulations by being too light. This left the Argentine powerless to respond to his Brazilian rival, despite his promising early form. Piquet moved to the head of the field with a last-gasp lap that proved good enough to prevent GP2 new boy Timo Glock from stealing all the day's headlines. The German, who appears to be considering a switch to GP2 despite winning this year's Champ Car rookie title, wound up nearly three-tenths shy of Piquet, but still created a strong impression on his first run in the ART Grand Prix car. Glock will be unable to build on that performance as he hands over to expected ART 2006 pilot Lewis Hamilton for the final day of testing tomorrow [Friday]. Macau F3 Grand Prix winner Lucas di Grassi made up for a disappointing morning in the Durango Dallara by moving up to third overall in the afternoon session. His lap of 1min 16.139secs - set in what was generally the quicker of the two sessions - was good enough to push BCN's Andreas Zuber back to fifth overall, despite an improvement, with 'team-mate' Borja Garcia vaulting from plum last before lunch into the top six by the close of play. Franck Perera, running with DAMS this week, placed sixth in the later session, but his morning time was good enough for a top four spot overall. The afternoon session was again highly competitive, with the whole field closing up to be covered by only three seconds. Behind the top six, Hayanari Shimoda (ART), Milos Pavlovic (Super Nova), Olivier Pla (DPR) and Luca Filippi (Coloni) completed the best ten, while Alexandre Negrao (Piquet), Alvaro Parente (Arden), Michael Ammermuller (Arden), rookie Mike Conway (iSport) and Ferdinando Monfardini (DAMS) all slipped back. Conway's partner at iSport for the day, Stephen Kane, continued his promising performance with 13th place to go with his eleventh from the morning.
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