Mike Rockenfeller clinches pole position in Zandvoort
Mike Rockenfeller (Audi Team Phoenix) turned around his recent streak of bad luck to claim pole position today at Circuit Park Zandvoort, host of the ninth and penultimate round of the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters. “Rocky” clocked the fastest time of 1:30.716, beating newly-crowned champion Marco Wittmann (BMW Team RMG) for just 26 thousands. Audi dominated the session, putting five cars on the six first positions of the grid.
Q1 started with cloudy and dry weather, in a session where grip, or the lack of it, would be crucial for car setup. Wittmann was the first pace setter, but Jamie Green (Audi Team Rosberg) clocked a fantastic 1:30.610 to climb to the first position, which he would keep until the end of the first part of qualifying. Paul Di Resta (Mercedes AMG) was going fast, and got himself in second place.
Vitaly Petrov was able to get out on track, with his Mercedes C-Coupe DTM being repaired on time after his first practice shunt. The Russian did a few installation laps, but finished the session in 23rd position. Petrov was pragmatic about his result: “This is the first time I race in this track, and this morning I went out because I took the corner too fast. I couldn’t work on setup, so there isn’t much more I could do in qualy.”
Also out after Q1 were Antonio Félix Da Costa, Augusto Farfus, Robert Wickens and Daniel Juncadella. The Spaniard was particularly disappointed with his result: “I don’t know what went wrong, it seems nothing was going right. I know this circuit very well, I won the Formula 3 Masters here, so I’m very disappointed to be starting from the last row of the grid.”
As usual, the Q2 saw a lot of action on the track, specially with laptimes being very close. Mattias Ekström (Audi Team Abt Sportsline) set the initial fastest time, followed by Jamie Green and Pascal Wehrlein. The young gun from Mercedes soon improved on Ekström’s time, to lead the second leg of the session until the end. Despite mounting fresh tyres, Joey Hand (BMW Team RBM) and Miguel Molina (Audi Team Abt Sportsline) weren’t able to get on the top 8.
The American driver was the first to not make it into Q3, being ninth, followed by Molina, Gary Paffett, Adrien Tambay, Paul Di Resta, Timo Glock, Bruno Spengler, Timo Scheider, Maxime Martin and Christian Vietoris, who reported power steering problems in the single Mercedes with the revised aero package.
Q3 saw most drivers setting their best laptime in their first attempt to do so. Pascal Wehrlein was the first to lead the time sheets, and was pipped by Mattias Ekström. Jamie Green was on a good lap, but attacked the chicane too hard and was only able to improve to fifth. Marco Wittmann set the fastest time again.
Mike Rockenfeller came on track as the other drivers had finished their first runs, and set a time of 1:30.713, bettering Wittmann’s lap by just 0.026 seconds, which was enough to secure pole position.
Audi took the following two rows of the grid, with Mortara in third position, followed by Ekström, Green and Nico Müller, in yet another strong effort towards achieving their first season victory.
Pascal Wehrlein was seventh, and was positively surprised with his result: “To be honest, I was surprised with my pace in Q1 and Q2. We got seventh place, but that’s a good result, if we keep in mind that we struggled in free practice.” Martin Tomczyk (BMW Team Schnitzer) was eighth, nearly nine tenths of a second behind Wehrlein.
The race will take place tomorrow at 13:33 and is programmed for 44 laps.
