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Sunday in Jarama Part 1 –  The rain in Spain is mainly Kiss’s gain

Sunday in Jarama Part 1 – The rain in Spain is mainly Kiss’s gain

04. October 2015Jarama - After the weathermen were so far off the mark with their forecasts yesterday – clouds instead of the promised summer weather and spells of light rain, – everybody here at the 9th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship at the Circuito del Jarama north of Spanish capital Madrid was hoping for a predictably wrong prediction. But that wasn’t to be; this time the mets were spot-on.
Lap times in the warm-up this morning were more than 30 seconds slower than those from yesterday. Buggyra Freightliner pilot Adam Lacko (CZE) was quickest, followed by an MAN duo of Norbert Kiss (HUN) and Antonio Albacete (ESP).
An hour later, when it was fully time for qualifying, the rain was coming down rather heavily. Now it was no longer a question of warming up — it was about setting a Top 10 qualifying time for the SuperPole.
Lacko and Kiss pitted after one flying lap apiece, certain of having made it; all the others kept going.
With rapidly improving grip levels, the lap times were tumbling and the classification in total disarray.
Two minutes before the close of the session Lacko and Kiss both rolled out again and improved their times by a massive margin, even though neither could surpass Albacete’s time of 2:24.902s; Lacko was only four-hundredths slower.
But even these times were around 27 seconds over their respective times from yesterday.
Kiss was third, ahead of an MAN quintet consisting of René Reinert (GER), Anthony Janiec (FRA), Jochen Hahn and Steffi Halm (both GER), and Frankie Vojtíšek (CZE); Czech Buggyra pilot David Vršecký; and German Sascha Lenz (MAN).
Lacko set the pace in the SuperPole with a lap a good second and a half quicker than his time in qualifying, but Albacete countered immediately, undercutting his time by a full second. Kiss, for his part, wasn’t about to sit patiently watching a cat-and-mouse game. The Hungarian soon decided it was time for him to have the last word, and simply blazed around the track to a timesheet-topping 2:22.389s. That was that.
Albacete starts Sunday’s first race alongside the new champion, with Lacko, Reinert, Vršecký, Janiec, Lenz, Vojtíšek, Halm, and Hahn occupying the next four rows on the grid.
The shootout over, the racers were getting into the open bus that would take them around the track for the drivers’ parade when the first rays of the sun penetrated the blanket of cloud.

Impressions:

Sunday in Jarama Part 1 –  The rain in Spain is mainly Kiss’s gain
Sunday in Jarama Part 1 –  The rain in Spain is mainly Kiss’s gain
Sunday in Jarama Part 1 –  The rain in Spain is mainly Kiss’s gain