Saturday in Zolder Part 1 – Norbert Kiss snatches pole at the last second

19. September 2015Zolder - The sky over Circuit Zolder was overcast, the thermometer was just registering double digits, and the Belgian weathermen just weren’t sounding optimistic this morning. The truck racers had to reckon with the possibility of intermittent precipitation at this first race day of the 8th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship.
At the warm-up it took the form of a shower of fine mist that rendered the track slippery. The lap times were up to 8 seconds slower than those in yesterday’s first free practice session on a dry track.
Czech Adam Lacko was a good half-second quicker in his Freightliner than Hungarian frontrunner Norbert Kiss in his MAN.
The trucks found much better grip in first qualifying, but it still didn’t look like there’d be any change in their earlier positions during the 20-minute session. Of course, the tyre conservation tactic was very much at play here, the top five returning to the pits after a single flying lap. Kiss’s 1:59.641s was the only time under 2 minutes, more than a second ahead of his bitterest rivals, Spaniard Antonio Albacete (MAN), the two Czech Buggyra pilots Lacko and David Vršecký, and German Jochen Hahn (MAN).
The rest of the field was so much slower that there was absolutely no fear of these five getting booted out of the Top 10.
At the end it was the three MAN pilots René Reinert (GER), Anthony Janiec (FRA), and Sascha Lenz (GER) who managed to make the SuperPole, together with the two Germans Roland Rehfeld (Mercedes-Benz) and Ellen Lohr (MAN).
This was Rehfeld’s first go; his tankpool24 teammate André Kursim, who had managed to make the Top 10 for the first time in Hungary, missed out by a minor margin - he finished 11th.
In the 10-minute shootout it was Lacko who set the standard with 1:59.502s, the quickest time of the day so far. Try as his competitors might, the Czech appeared to have secured pole position for the first race - till the very last second.
Kiss, lapping on the edge, crossed the line right at the very close in 1:59.136s, four-tenths quicker than Lacko. Vršecký and Albacete took third and fourth on the grid, followed by Hahn, Reinert, Janiec, Lohr, Lenz, and Rehfeld.

Impressions: