Saturday in Most Part 1 - Norbert Kiss wins SuperPole

30. August 2014Most - It had rained a bit in the early morning, but not as heavily as yesterday evening to require galoshes to get about. The track was still quite damp when the race trucks pulled onto the track for the warm-up at the first race day of the 6th round of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship at Autodrom Most. But then, with the sun peeking through the clouds ever more boldly, the asphalt started to dry out rapidly and the lap times kept dropping. And so all the drivers set their best times in their final laps, but local hero Adam Lacko was the only one to breach 2:04s in his Buggyra Freightliner.
When qualifying began following a slight delay, Hungarian Norbert Kiss stunned the field with a time of 2:02.491s in his very first lap out. The best his MAN colleague and defending champ Jochen Hahn could manage was a lap three-tenths slower; nobody else was anywhere close.
As is now the norm, the top drivers were back in the pits after one flying lap — a vital tactic to conserve their tyres for the SuperPole and the races thereafter. The other drivers who qualified for the shootout, in order, were Spaniard Antonio Albacete (MAN), the two Czech Buggyra pilots David Vršecký and Adam Lacko, the MANler Markus Bösiger (SUI), Frankie Vojtíšek (CZE), Benedek Major (HUN) and René Reinert (GER), the lone race-by-race pilot Gerd Körber (GER) rounding out the top 10 in his Iveco.
Kiss promptly emblazed the circuit with a new benchmark – 2:02.033s – in his first flying lap. Hahn was only a wee tenth behind. By now the track was almost completely dry, and there was little the rest of the field could gain to improve their times. And so pole position for the day’s first race was Kiss’s once again, with Hahn alongside. Albacete, Lacko, Bösiger, Vršecký, Reinert, Major, Körber, and Vojtíšek make up the rest of the next four rows of the grid.

Impressions: