Nelson Piquet Jr claimed car numbers 3 and 4 for his Hitech Piquet Sports team today by finishing second fastest in a highly-competitive qualifying session at the series' launch day at Paul Ricard.

After two days of official testing at the Circuit Paul Ricard, the 24 GP2 drivers took part in the qualifying session this afternoon. The session was split up into two halves, with Nelson competing in the second part, and team-mate Xandinho Negrão in the first. The overall times determined the team race numbers for the season, with the fastest driver claiming numbers 1 and 2 for his team and so on.

Testing has also gone well for the team, with Nelson topping the timesheets on the first day with a time of 1:19.388, four-tenths quicker than his nearest rival. Combined, the Hitech Piquet Sports drivers managed to complete a total of 107 laps of testing on Monday. The team completed a further 53 laps of testing yesterday, with Nelson recording the fourth fastest time.

Hitech Piquet Sports will have just one further two-day test in Barcelona next week to prepare before embarking on the GP2 Series' inaugural season, which commences in Imola on 22 April.

Nelson Piquet Jr (Car No. 3): "I am very happy. I was expecting to have a single number on the car and I was wishing for number one, but second quickest in qualifying to give me number 3 is good I think! The car was good but I did not get 100% of everything to come together, maybe we could have been fastest. We can see now there are not many cars that are quicker than us. Scott Speed did a very good job considering he doesn't have that much experience. I am even more relaxed now I see we are one of the fastest. I know I have a good chance to be fast in the championship. The team did a good job and if we continue progressing the way we have done we can really fight for the championship."

Overall Times

1. iSport International 1:19.414 (Speed, session 2)
2. Hitech Piquet Sports 1:19.612 (Piquet, session 2)
3. BCN Competicion 1:19.726 (Viso, session 2)
4. Super Nova International 1:19.947 (Pantano, session 2)
5. ART Grand Prix 1:19.979 (Rosberg, session 1)
6. DPR 1:20.042 (Pla, session 2)
7. Dams 1:20.097 (Lopez, session 2)
8. Coloni Motorsport 1:20.138 (Bruni, session 2)
9. Racing Engineering 1:20.200 (García, session 1)
10. Campos Racing 1:20.203 (Alvarez, session 1)
11. Arden International 1:20.271 (Kovalainen, session 2)
12. Durango 1:20.640 (Piccione, session 2)