Barcelona: Venezuelan driver Pastor Maldonado was the fastest at a Formula One testing session on Thursday.
The Williams driver's lap time of 1 minute, 22.391 seconds at Catalunya Circuit was nearly a second quicker than Michael Schumacher for Mercedes.
Sauber driver Kamui Kobayashi was third with Jenson Button of McLaren and Toro Rosso's Jean-Eric Vergne rounding out the top five on the next-to-last day of the pre-season's penultimate session.
Red Bull driver Mark Webber filled in for F1 champion Sebastian Vettel, the Australian finishing more than two seconds off the pace.
Felipe Massa of Ferrari was just behind Webber in seventh, with Force India, Marussia and Caterham filling out the grid.
Paul Di Resta got behind the wheels of VJM05-02 to collect vital input for Force India. The Scot completed 83 laps, covering 386kms with a fastest lap timing of 1:25.646.
"Quite an intense day and a very busy afternoon, but the main thing is that we achieved the objectives for the day. There will be a lot of analysing tonight to see what we can learn, especially trying to understand the data from the long runs this afternoon," Resta said.
Chief Engineer Jakob Andreasen was also satisfied with the team's work on the third day.
"After the install lap we went straight into the aero programme with some sweeps around the front of the car. We lost some time with a bodywork issue late in the morning, but the afternoon proved more productive and we made up for the time we lost with a revised programme."
"We ran with the hard and medium compound tyres and completed the short and long runs we had planned, whilst also making numerous changes to the mechanical and aero balance of the car. It was an excellent effort from the team at the track to come away with all the long run data we needed and that has set us up nicely for our final day of work tomorrow."
Testing ends on Friday.
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