Jolyon Palmer will be back in the cockpit of a Lotus F1 car at this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix, having impressed the team with his performance first time out in China last Friday.

The Briton, Lotus' official reserve for 2015, took on a watching brief for the opening two rounds in Australia and Malaysia as regular drivers Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado maximised their track time in order to hone the performance of this year's E23, before finally making his F1 weekend debut at the Shanghai International Circuit.

Despite having only a few laps from winter testing under his belt, and after an early spin that did little for his first set of Pirelli tyres, Palmer ended the 90 minutes just over half a second of the vastly more experienced Maldonado before handing his car back to Grosjean for the day's second session.

"I've been waiting to get my hands on the E23 during a grand prix weekend and the experience didn't disappoint," he said immediately after completing aero and set-up evaluations in China, "The track was quite green which provided its own set of slippery challenges and I had to learn the circuit quickly as I hadn't driven in Shanghai before but, overall, I'm happy with P15. I was able to complete a decent tally of laps and test the limits of grip on a couple of occasions on the fresh track. It was great to be out on track and mixing it on a grand prix weekend."

Without a race drive after winning last year's GP2 Series title and concentrating on landing a permanent F1 ride in future, Palmer is scheduled to have as many as ten FP1 outings this season, and he confirmed over the weekend that he would be back out Bahrain just a week after his first appearance.

Good news to end the day, I will be back in the car for FP1 in Bahrain! See you next week! pic.twitter.com/IunOk8UH5v-- Jolyon Palmer (@JolyonPalmer) April 10, 2015

With previous track knowledge of the Bahrain International Circuit following his various GP2 events there, Palmer is hoping to be even closer to whichever team-mate he partners in the session.

"Bahrain is only a week away, so it keeps me in the groove in the car," he concluded, "It's a track I know, so I'm hoping for improvement obviously."