Jolyon Palmer ended a frustrating weekend in Bahrain, which saw his iSport car continually plagued by electrical issues, to finish P22 during today's (Saturday) GP2 Sprint Race.

With the problem occurring in all of the previous sessions, the 21-year-old started today's 23-lap race 24th but yet again was unable to get away off the line as the car broke down, forcing him to start from the pit lane nearly a lap behind.

Despite this, he recovered quickly and demonstrated that he had the pace to challenge at the front of the field, setting the fastest lap of the race early on and consistently lapping quicker than the front-runners.

Running in free air, he began to close down on the cars ahead of him, lapping around three seconds quicker than the tail enders and over half a second faster than the race leader.

He was able to pass Dani Clos on lap eight to move up a place and then set about catching Giancarlo Serenelli who was lapping two seconds slower. Despite being 60 seconds adrift of him, Palmer managed to close the gap to just 10 seconds by the end of the race and moving up to 22nd on the final lap after Simon Trummer hit trouble.

Speaking afterwards Palmer said: "Once again the car broke down at the start so I had to start from the pit lane nearly a lap behind everyone else. I have to say this is ridiculous, every session this weekend has been messed up by the same problem and now both weekends in Bahrain. Unless something is found in the next couple of weeks we will be heading to Barcelona fearing the same problem which will be totally unacceptable. The guys at iSport have done their best to diagnose the problem and they have changed so many car parts but still the problem is there so we will see what we do now. It is more disappointing because once again we had unbelievable pace and should have had a massive haul of points from this weekend."

At the front, Tom Dillmann took his first ever GP2 series win from the reverse pole, fending off Luiz Razia's Arden machine, while Davide Valsecchi secured third for DAMS.

The next rounds of the 2012 GP2 Series takes place in Barcelona on 11-13 May with full coverage on Jolyon's official website.

GP2 Bahrain, Sprint Race results:

1. T Dillmann, Rapax, 23 laps
2. L Razia, Arden, +0.1s
3. D Valsecchi, DAMS, +3.9s
4. E Gutierrez, Lotus, +16.4s
5. F Nasr, DAMS, +18.6s
6. R Haryanto, Carlin, +20.4s
7. M Ericsson, iSport, +26.2s
8. F Leimer, Racing, +29.6s
9. F Onidi, Scuderia, +33.4s
22. J Palmer, iSport, +78.6s*

*Fastest Lap - J Palmer