GP2 Silverstone: Red Bull's Gasly fastest in tight practice session

The Frenchman had the best of the first runs, before there were hardly any improvements in the second half of the session as tyres faded, even with everyone using the hard-compound Pirelli rubber and with relatively cool temperatures.

Gasly was 0.155 seconds ahead of Sergey Sirotkin on the opening runs, and that's how it stayed for the rest of the session.

"The session has been good," said Gasly.

"Now we need to concentrate on qually because the gaps are small, but it's a good beginning.

"The front tyres were a little bit difficult to get up to temperature, and then after there was quite a lot of degradation, but already the pace is good."

Gasly's point about the times being close came after Sirotkin's ART Grand Prix car finished the session as the fastest of 12 rivals who were all within a second of the pace.

Third was Rapax driver Arthur Pic, while the second Prema entry of Antonio Giovinazzi was fourth on the Italian's first trip to Silverstone in anything more potent than a Formula 3 or LMP2 car.

Williams development driver Alex Lynn led the British trio, fifth for DAMS, with his fellow Barcelona winner Norman Nato leading the Racing Engineering charge in sixth.

Oliver Rowland, back at the scene of his eye-opening GP2 debut last year, finished up seventh with MP Motorsport, with Red Bull Ring sprint-race victor Jordan King (Racing Engineering) in eighth.

Back after missing the last round due to being banned for his safety-car fails in Baku, Nobuharu Matsushita put his ART car ninth, with Artem Markelov completing the top 10 in his Russian Time machine.

Markelov's team-mate Raffaele Marciello, who leads the standings, was down in 13^th and was the last man within a second of Gasly.

He trailed Red Bull Ring feature-race winner Mitch Evans and Luca Ghiotto - the Italian's car triggered a virtual safety car half an hour into the session when it was parked just off the track at Village.

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