Saturday at the Red Bull Ring Part 1 - Kiss once again on pole
05. July 2014Spielberg - Morning dawned to a heavy shower over the Red Bull Ring. Even though the rain let up, those familiar with the Austrian Alps say the weather will stay unpredictable and there could be a downpour at any moment. But the track had dried sufficiently in time for the warm-up at this, the fourth round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, so that the racers had no difficulty picking up where they’d left off in yesterday’s free practice.
Hungarian Norbert Kiss was once again the quickest of the pack, albeit seven-thousandths off his best time yesterday. But in the warm-up you don’t really knows if a driver is at his or her limit; it’s only in qualifying that they’ve got to play their hand. But even before it got that far, the session had to be interrupted after a brake disc on Steffi Halm’s MAN broke and the young German left a 100m-long streak of rubber on the track as her truck ploughed into the tyre barrier and mounted the Armco before coming to rest.
The session resumed 35 minutes later, but the disruption had taken toll. Those drivers who were confident they’d gone quick enough for a place in the Top 10 stayed in the pits; the others strove harder to make it into the SuperPole.
Besides Kiss, the others who eventually made it were Jochen Hahn (GER) and Antonio Albacete (ESP) – both MAN, – Gerd Körber (GER) in his Iveco, Buggyra Freightliner pilot Adam Lacko, the Swiss MANler Markus Bösiger, Iveco driver Markus Altenstrasser (AUT), the Czech David Vršecký (Buggyra Freightliner), and Benedek Major (HUN) and René Reinert (GER), both MAN.
After the first flying laps Hahn was five-thousandths ahead of Kiss. Both stepped up their pace, the German managing to stay ahead for most of the 10-minute session till Kiss settled the matter with a manic 1:05.360s (he’d been quicker the day before, but this was good enough for pole today). Hahn held on to second place not quite three-hundredths slower, followed by Albacete, Major, Bösiger, Lacko, Körber, Vršecký, Reinert, and Altenstrasser.
Impressions:
