Saturday in Zolder Part 1 - Kiss crushes the competition to take pole

11. September 2021Zolder - The teams awoke to a wild wind on the first race day of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship event at Circuit Zolder. It was dry when the trucks rolled out at 9 am for the warm-up. Some of the teams used the time to test changes to setups carried out overnight; others to break in a new set of tyres; and still others, to see where they could extract the maximum advantage from a completely dry track.
One of the lattermost was surely Hungarian MAN-of-the-moment Norbert Kiss, who surged to the top on his sixth lap with a 1:56.585.
Antonio Albacete, Sascha Lenz, René Reinert, and Adam Lacko made up the Top 5.
Kiss’s first lap in qualifying put him on top of the leaderboard again, and he was dutifully followed back into the pits by the next five – Lenz, Hahn, Lacko, Albacete, and Reinert, all helping themselves to the luxury of saving their tyres for the sterner stuff ahead. The rest had to keep going to make it into, or be certain of their place in, the Super Pole.
Clemens Hecker’s MAN stalled right at trackside and the session had to be interrupted till the truck was towed away into safety. The dying minutes of the green-lighted remainder of Q1 saw eight trucks in furious pursuit of the four Super Pole slots still open. At the close it was Calvet, Kursim, Brereton, and Anderson who’d made the cut.
Hahn in the #1 Iveco leapfrogged Kiss to clock quickest on his first flying lap, with Lenz third-fastest. On his second flyer the Hungarian went seven hundredths quicker, his 1:56.685 besting Hahn’s by a tenth.
Lenz and Albacete will start from the second row of the grid, ahead of Lacko, Kursim, Reinert, Brereton, Calvet, and Anderson.