Saturday at the Slovakiaring Part 1 – Kiss is quickest for pole

15. July 2017Slovakiaring - The first race day of this 4th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship at the Slovakia Ring near Bratislava dawned cloudy and cool, the temperature a tad under 20°.
In free practice yesterday the racers took a while to find their feet on a circuit most had never set wheel on before. Moreover, at almost 6 km, the longest track configuration of Automotodróm Slovakia Ring being used for the ETRC is also the longest circuit withal in the championship – that’s going to take some getting used to.
Nevertheless, average speeds in excess of 130 km/h clearly indicate a large proportion of high-speed sections, in which the pilots max out at the 160 km/h limit. What effect that has on the tyres will only be known over the course of the weekend.
Tankpool24’s Hungarian ace Norbert Kiss set the pace in his Mercedes in morning’s warm-up. Of course, it still wasn’t clear whether the competition had played its hand – that would only be known in qualifying.
The session started off with a warm-up lap not significantly slower than the quickest laps in practice – everyone was totally conscious that they were in a race against the clock, with the possibility of only one fast lap in the 10 minutes available. Should this attempt flop, the driver would have to keep going without allowing the truck to cool down.
His 2:42.928 was somewhat slower than his time in warm-up, but Kiss was still quickest of the drivers that made the Super Pole. As it turned out, his closest rival Adam Lacko hadn’t been pushing as hard either – the Czech was almost half a second off in his Buggyra Freightliner, but he in turn was only five hundredths clear of Iveco pilot Jochen Hahn (GER), who himself was only five hundredths ahead of Spaniard Antonio Albacete in his MAN. German Steffi Halm (MAN), Freightliner pilot David Vršecký (CZE), a German trio consisting of Gerd Körber (Iveco), Sascha Lenz (MAN), and André Kursim (Mercedes), and Portuguese José Rodrigues (MAN) completed the Top 10 for the Super Pole.
Here again Kiss showed there’s just no getting the better of him, with an unbeatable 2:42.770. A little less than half a second behind lay a quartet consisting of Albacete, Lacko, Hahn, and Halm, spread less than two tenths of a second apart – the Spaniard a sheer thousandth ahead of the Czech, and 11 and 17 thousandths respectively ahead of Hahn and Halm.
Vršecký, Lenz, Körber, Kursim, and José Rodrigues make up the rest of the start grid.

Impressions: