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Saturday in Jarama Part 1 - Hahn takes pole

Saturday in Jarama Part 1 - Hahn takes pole

05. October 2019Jarama - At this time of year in Jarama, one thing is certain: it gets real cold at night and real hot in the day, when the sun beats down on the circuit from a cloudless sky. When the racers rolled out for the warm-up this morning the temperature was just above 10°C in the shade, but all you needed was a T-shirt in the sun. It took a while for the trucks and their pilots to get their circulation going. Czech Adam Lacko (Buggyra Freightliner) was the first to go under 2 minutes, but newly crowned six-times champ Jochen Hahn (GER) undercut him in no time. Hungarian Mercedes pilot Norbert Kiss was the third to top the timing monitor. The next olé was for local matador Antonio Albacete (MAN), who went fastest of all with 1:58.528.
The other pilots went on to improve their times, and at the end as many as nine had squeezed under 2:00.
It had gotten warmer till FP2, and everyone now appeared to be taking things a tad easier. Hahn finished on top with 1:58.989, one of the few who actually improved his time through the session, with Albacete only seven hundredths slower. The rest of the usual suspects were all up there too.
It was 20° in the shade at noon, and hot in the sun, when qualifying began. Apropos, the competition in Q1 and the Super Pole was as hot as it gets. Hahn recorded 1:58.567 on his flier, Lacko chasing him home to as close as three hundredths. Kiss, German MAN pilot Sascha Lenz, and Albacete all did 1:58s, as well, peeling off into pit lane immediately to conserve their tyres – the track surface in Jarama has a reputation as being one of the more severely abrasive. Also mindful of their tyres were the German Iveco trio of André Kursim, René Reinert, and Steffi Halm, who’d all lapped in the low 1:59s, secure in the knowledge that the 11th-placed driver, the first one they’d been able to dump out of the Top 10, would have needed to go at least a second and a half faster.
MAN pilots José Rodrigues (POR) and Jamie Anderson (GBR) also squeezed in.
Hahn’s 1:58.300 in the Super Pole was the top time of the day, winning him his 13th pole of the season. Albacete missed out by just one tenth, and the rest of the field too was very close together. With the exception of Anderson, who crawled back at the end of his out lap with a gearbox problem and subsequently had to be towed back into the paddock, everyone went at it again after the customary cool-down lap. Only Lenz actually went quicker, snapping up P3 from under Steffi’s nose by two thousandths. Close behind came Lacko, Kiss, and Kursim, the quintet separated by all of 18 hundredths.
José Rodrigues and Reinert will start from P8 and P9, ahead of Anderson.