Australian Michael Rogers is fourth, 12 seconds behind leader Peter Sagan who won the first stage of the Tour de Romandie to take hold of the yellow jersey.
Sagan, riding for the Liquigas team, pipped Italian Francesco Gavazzi and Ireland's Nicolas Roche in a mass sprint finish to the 176km stage held in Switzerland's Jura hills.
The 19-year-old now has a nine second lead over Italian Marco Pinotti, with Rogers a further three seconds off the pace.
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France's Thibaut Pinot (FDJ) ran the race for more than nine-tenths of the distance between Porrentruy and Fleurier.
The 19-year-old led a runaway group of three young riders and doggedly defied the rest of the field's return over the final climbs.
Pinot, Kazakhstan's Andrey Zeits (AST) and US rider Chad Beyer (BMC), swiftly built up a lead of more than nine minutes after they broke away barely 20 minutes into the stage.
The peloton began to fight back two hours later and relentlessly reeled in the runaway bunch as they split up, leaving Pinot alone until the field caught up with him 15 kilometres from the finish.
By then repeated accelerations over the unexpectedly trying final portion of Jura hills had worn out Briton Mark Cavendish (THR), dashing his chances of taking part in a widely predicted mass sprint at Fleurier.
Sagan's Liquigas team, led by last year's Romandie winner Roman Kreuziger and backed by former Giro winner Italian Ivan Basso, largely controlled the final kilometres.
"I'm very happy," said the 20 year-old Slovak, who finished second in the prologue on Tuesday.
"Those climbs were really hard. But after we cleared the final climb it went a bit better," he added.
Over the next two days the Tour de Romandie will stay on relatively flat terrain near Fribourg before an individual time trial.
But final stages on the weekend will involve testing climbs in the French and Swiss Alps.
