Javier Villa marked himself as a major title contender as he topped the second day of GP2 Series testing at Paul Ricard in France.

The 20-year-old Spaniard, who won three races on his way to sixth in last year's championship, is sticking with the Racing Engineering squad this season and lapped the circuit in a pace-setting time of 1:12.254.

Russian Vitaly Petrov was his closest challenger as the Campos driver lapped three hundredths of a second slower, while ART's Romain Grosjean, the leader of the GP2 Asia Series, was third on the timesheets.

Fourth quickest - one place lower than he managed on day one - was Britain's Mike Conway.

"I'm pretty satisfied with what we did this week," said the Trident driver. "We were able to carry on a huge amount of work, testing several technical solutions in order to verify their real on-track performance.

"The best time we clocked this afternoon was just two tenths of a second off the best one, so I think that it'll be a great starting point for our immediate future.

"It was my first test with Trident Racing, and I'm happy with the whole team's environment. I'm really looking forward to [next week's test at] Barcelona, as we have the right potential to stay at the top."

The all-Spanish FMS duo of Andy Soucek and Adrian Valles were next up with Karun Chandhok's iSport car right behind.

Piquet team-mates Andreas Zuber and Pastor Maldonado followed him with Yelmer Buurman rounding out the top ten for Arden.

Britain's Ben Hanley, who set the opening day pace, was only 18th fastest for Campos.

It was the second day of running for the all-new GP2 car and once more there were no serious problems.

The only issues that did arise came in the form of the loosening of a few steering racks, which was most likely caused by excessive vibrations through the front wheels due to the increased speed of the new machine.

Jamie O'Leary / Eurosport