Sunday at the Hungaroring Part 1 - Norbi nicks pole

28. August 2016Hungaroring - After a quiet evening – you wouldn’t know just how much work was going on in the background, – it was back to action on the second race day of this 5th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship at the Hungaroring on the outskirts of Budapest.
The conversations last evening predominantly centred on Frankie Vojtíšek’s crash into the pit wall within sight of the finish. Almost the entire field had been summoned by race control to answer for a litany of transgressions. The outcome of a lengthy deliberation on the last-corner crash was a warning for Norbert Kiss.
Team Frankie will, today’s activities in the extremely compact paddock permitting, return home to the Czech Republic immediately to start work on rebuilding the race truck in time for its home event, next weekend’s Czech Truck Prix at Autodrom Most.
This morning the focus was back on the racing ahead. At 8:30 am the trucks were out on their warm-up, Norbert Kiss in his tankpool24 Mercedes being the first to go under 2:17s.
As the racers got ready to go out for qualifying the thermometer read 27°C. They all stepped on it from the word go - Kiss in particular, who set the track afire with the weekend’s quickest lap, a 2:16.724s. MANler Jochen Hahn was next, seven-tenths slower. Of course, all that really mattered was to have a time within the top 10 and qualify for the SuperPole.
Once again, it was just one flying lap for most of this relatively modest field. Besides
Kiss and Hahn the list included MAN drivers Steffi Halm (GER) and Ryan Smith (GBR), Czech Adam Lacko (Buggyra Freightliner), Frenchman Anthony Janiec (MAN), Iveco hand Gerd Körber, and the German MAN duo of Sascha Lenz and Ellen Lohr. The two youngsters, Czech Jiří Forman (Buggyra Freightliner) and German André Kursim in his tankpool24-Mercedes, battled on for the final SuperPole slot, Forman winning that one in the dying moments of the session.
After a 5-minute break the shootout began. Conspicuously, this time again some of the racers lapped slower than they’d done in qualifying and, indeed, in warm-up.
Right till the last minute it looked like Hahn had locked out his second pole, but then Norbi, as we’ve seen him do so often in the last couple of seasons, snatched it out of the German’s grasp - by not quite nine-hundredths of a second!
Lacko, Janiec, Halm, Lohr, Smith, Körber, Forman, and Lenz qualified behind them on places three through 10 on the grid.

Impressions: