Albon, who was a close second to ART Grand Prix teammate Nobuharu Matsushita on the opening day of testing, headed Tuesday running with a 1m28.255s lap in the morning session.

The Anglo-Thai driver took over at the top of the timesheets in the second hour of track time, following a circuit inspection red flag.

Rapax's Johnny Cecotto ran Albon close but came up 0.025s short, while Russian Time's Artem Markelov was two tenths off in third, heading Nicholas Latifi (DAMS) and early leader Norman Nato (Arden).

For much of the afternoon, laptimes were nowhere near those set in the morning session, MP Motorsport's Jordan King heading the pack with a low-1m30s effort.

Prema's Ferrari junior duo Antonio Fuoco and Charles Leclerc took over at the top in the final hour, before McLaren protege Nyck de Vries (Rapax) capped off the afternoon session with a 1m29.233s effort – but Albon's best time of the day remained untroubled.

Overall, 12 drivers surpassed Matsushita's Monday benchmark, the Japanese McLaren F1 protege himself last among them.

Ex-F1 driver Roberto Merhi, testing with Campos, found 1.4s compared to his opening day, but was only 18th overall, ahead of Nabil Jeffri and Gustav Malja, who had his morning session times wiped when his car was found to be underweight.

Day 2 results