Santiago Urrutia has taken his first pole position in the Kumho FIA TCR World Tour since China last year, leading an all Lynk & Co Cyan Racing 1-2-3, with Yann Ehrlacher second and Ma Qing Hua third. They easily went through to Q2, but Thed Björk, the team’s leading points scorer, missed the cut, struggling with his brakes, and qualified in 11th. The other big name to fall in Q1 was the championship points leader Esteban Guerrieri who set the 14th fastest time.
Behind the three Lynk & Co cars, Ignacio Montenegro was just two-tenths of a second away in his Honda Civic run by GOAT Racing, while Norbert Michelisz was the best of the Hyundai drivers in fifth place.
Among the guest stars, Eric Gené qualified an impressive sixth on his series debut, the best-placed of all the CUPRA cars, just ahead of his TCR Europe rival Marco Butti’s Honda.
Mikel Azcona qualified eighth but has two grid penalties for an infringement in practice as well as carried over from Mexico, and will drop to 14th, promoting Aurélien Comte, Néstor Girolami, and Björk to the positions from eighth to tenth. The Spaniard had picked up the new lap record in Q1, the only driver in a TCR car ever to lap Valencia under 1:40, with a time of 1:39.840, but he was unable to repeat this in Q2.
“I dedicate this pole to my team, we started the weekend with things not working very well, and my engineer was a little worried, but I said we can always turn things around. Once I set my first lap in Q1, it felt OK,” said Urrutia after receiving the Pole Position Trophy; he then added: “I did a few laps yesterday and the tyres drop a lot here, the heat is quite high, and with 30kg of Compensation Weight is not easy. Let’s see if we can finish the job for today.”
The first race of the weekend starts at 16:50 CEST today.
Qualifying
1:40.037 Santiago Urrutia (Lynk & Co Cyan Racing, Lynk & Co 03 FL)
1:40.070 Yann Ehrlacher (Lynk & Co Cyan Racing, Lynk & Co 03 FL)
1:40.146 Ma Qing Hua (Lynk & Co Cyan Racing, Lynk & Co 03 FL)
Championship points
- E. Guerrieri, 95 pts; 2. S. Urrutia, 84; 3. T. Björk, 83
Picture: WSC/Fastclick
