Max Verstappen 6th in TQ2
In the end Max Verstappen drove in Top Qualifying 2, which for Formula 1 fans would be equivalent to the Q2 of qualifying in a normal GP weekend. And he managed to achieve the minimum goal on the official practice Friday of the 24h of Nurburgring Nordschleife: to set one of the top seven best times to advance to TQ3, the decisive session that awarded the pole position.
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After setting the fastest lap, the session was long neutralized with a slow zone due to the accident of the twin Mercedes (the fastest on Thursday) with Maro Engel at the wheel. However, towards the end, once the green flag returned, other crews managed to improve, pushing the Dutchman down to sixth place: a result still sufficient to pass the cut after, in TQ1, teammate Lucas Auer had finished fifth, surpassing the first elimination (which rewarded the top 20 times).
The fight for pole with Daniel Juncadella
Since the regulations prohibit a driver from taking part in more than one qualifying session, in the decisive phase of TQ3 the wheel of the number 3 Mercedes of the Verstappen.com Racing team was handed to Daniel Juncadella. The Spaniard did not secure the pole position, but still set a time slightly slower than that set by Max Verstappen in the previous session (but with inevitably somewhat different conditions), which allowed the crew to take fourth place on the starting grid.
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Lamborghini and Audi beat Mercedes and BMW
The Mercedes-AMG GT3 of the four-time F1 world champion is however the best on the grid, as the front row is occupied by the two Lamborghini Huracan GT3 of the Red Bull ABT team, able to monopolize the front row with crews composed of Luca Engstler (the pole sitter), Mirko Bortolotti and Patric Niederhauser and by Marco Mapelli, Nicky Catsburg and Nick Yelloly. In third place is the Audi R8 of the Scherer Sport team, driven by Christopher Haase (in crew with Alexander Sims and Ben Green), who was the protagonist in March of a long and thrilling wheel-to-wheel battle precisely with Verstappen.
Thus, the number 3 crew manages to close the qualifying Friday quite well avoiding the main pitfalls arising from the risk of starting very far back and getting stuck in traffic in the early hours of the race. The BMW of the Rowe team defending the title, whose crew is composed of Augusto Farfus, Raffaele Marciello, Jordan Pepper and Kelvin Van Der Linde, starts instead from ninth position.
The program of the 24h Nurburgring (and Max Verstappen’s)
The cars will return to the track on Saturday morning for an hour of warm-up, scheduled from 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning. The start of Max Verstappen’s first 24 Hours of Nurburgring is instead set for 15:00 (with the full formation lap starting at 14:40) which we will broadcast live for free on FormulaPassion.it: here is the full weekend program.
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