Jolyon Palmer set the fourth fastest time in this morning's (Thursday) GP2 free practice session on the iconic streets of Monaco.

The 22-year-old, who drives for Carlin in the F1 support series was a race winner in the GP2 sprint race at Monaco last year and regularly ran in the top-10 during the 30 minute session, held under clear blue skies.

Jolyon completed 18 laps of the challenging street circuit, with his time of 1m22.059s coming with less than two minutes remaining in the session, and just over half a second away from the fastest time posted by Sam Bird. 

He will now go into the crucial 'split' qualifying session for tomorrow's feature race at 15.15PM UK time.

Speaking afterwards, Jolyon commented: "It was a good session. I had a lot of traffic early on but then was competitive all the way through. Hopefully we can find another few tenths and be in the mix for pole. I will be in the second session in qualifying and hopefully with fewer cars on track, traffic should be better."

GP2 Monaco free practice session result:

1. Sam Bird, 1m21.512s
2. Tom Dillmann, +0.057s
3. Mitch Evans, +0.242s
4. Jolyon Palmer, +0.547s
5. Marcus Ericsson, +0.778s
6. Johnny Cecotto, +0.879s
7. Fabio Leimer, +0.987s
8. Felipe Nasr, +1.004s
9. Rio Haryanto, +1.066s
10. James Calado, +1.135s

Full coverage of rounds seven and eight of the 2013 GP2 season at Monaco, including live timing, will be available on Jolyon's official website www.jolyonpalmer.com, while live TV coverage of all sessions will be available on Sky's F1 HD Channel.