Jolyon Palmer has taken an early GP2 Championship lead on his debut for DAMS by securing pole position for the opening round of the 2014 season in Bahrain.

Pole position, his second in his GP2 career, lands the 23-year-old with four points in the championship, and was secured with his final effort in the 30-minute floodlit session. His time, a 1m38.865s, put him 0.030s ahead of Stoffel Vandoorne, the only two drivers to break into the 1m38s bracket.

Jolyon ran fifth in the early exchanges before pitting for fresh rubber at the session mid point. With nine minutes remaining he returned to the track only for the session to be red flagged when the Russian Time car of Artem Markelov spun at turn one.

The field returned to the circuit with seven and a half minutes remaining and after a couple of warm up laps, Jolyon posted the quickest time of the weekend so far, with his time proving unbeatable for the remainder of the runners.

Jolyon will look to convert his pole position into victory during the first feature race of the season which starts at 11.10am tomorrow (Saturday).

"I'm so happy with that!" Jolyon enthused after qualifying. "I knew we could be fighting for pole but on the first set of tyres I flat spotted them extremely badly and couldn't do a great lap time. Then I managed to put it all together for the second run and it worked out perfectly. Now we need to focus a lot on tomorrow to try and win the race."

GP2 Series Bahrain Qualifying result:

1. J Palmer, DAMS, 1m38.865s
2. S Vandoorne, ART GP, +0.030s
3. D Abt, Hilmer, +0.208s
4. S Richelmi, DAMS, +0.216s
5. R Haryanto, Caterham +0.363s
6. S Coletti, Racing Engineering, +0.406s
7. M Evans, Russian Time, +0.409s
8. F Nasr, Carlin, +0.436s
9. R Marciello, Racing Engineering, +0.584s
10. A Pic, Campos, +0.597s