With less than two weeks to go until the start of the 2013 GP2 Series, Jolyon Palmer put the finishing touches to his pre-season preparations by going fifth quickest overall during today's (Thursday 7 March) third and final test day in Barcelona.

Following two days of continuous wet weather at the Spanish circuit, today's final outing allowed drivers to lay down their first meaningful lap times, with Jolyon wasting little time to end the morning stint in P4.

With plenty of unused dry tyres at his disposal, Jolyon used the afternoon stint to focus on fine-tuning his qualifying setup and was on course for a P2 slot late in the session until he was blocked in the final sector.

Meanwhile, Rapax's Stefano Coletti topped the overall timesheets ahead of Dams' driver Marcus Ericsson and Jolyon's Carlin team-mate Felipe Nasr.

Speaking afterwards Jolyon said: "It was a frustrating test in many ways with the weather really hampering our test programme for the first two days. We did get some useful information in the wet though and when the track did finally dry out we did some good work with the new tyres. Both Felipe and I look to be on the pace. Unfortunately I suffered from traffic on my quickest lap so the times weren't quite representative but the pace is strong and we head to Malaysia in a confident mood." 

This marked the end of the pre-season testing for the GP2 drivers, and the opening rounds of the season will take place in Sepang, Malaysia on March 22-24. Full coverage, including live timing, will be available on Jolyon's official website while live TV coverage of all sessions will be available on Sky's F1 HD Channel.

GP2 Barcelona test results, Day three - combined times:

1. S Coletti, Rapax, 1:29.055s
2. M Ericsson, Dams, 1:29.217s
3. F Nasr, Carlin, 1:29.381s
4. S Richelmi, Dams, 1:29.453s
5. J Palmer, Carlin, 1:29.467s
6. S Canamasas, Caterham, 1:29.611s
7. J Calado, ART, 1:29.624s
8. K Giovesi, Lazarus, 1:29.812s
9. T Dillmann, Russian Time, 1:29.843s
10. F Leimer, Racing Engineering, 1:29.862s