Yvan Muller claims pole in rain-hit qualifying in Moscow

Yvan Muller has claimed pole position for the sixth round of the FIA World Touring Car Championship, as a late rain shower disrupted the ten minute Q2 session.

The three-time champion will start ahead of the ROAL Motorsport BMW 320 TC of Tom Coronel, who was fastest in Q1 and set the qualifying lap record at the circuit with a time of 1:42.966.

Coronel was Muller’s main threat for pole position, with the Dutchman setting the fastest time in FP1 and the track suiting the rear-wheel drive BMWs, as seen with Mehdi Bennani’s Proteam BMW and Charles Ng’s Liqui Moly Team Engstler car also making the top ten. With Ng qualifying in ninth and Bennani tenth, the two drivers will start from the front row for the reversed grid second race tomorrow.

Muller’s time in Q2 of 1:43.335 was just seven hundredths of a second faster than that of Coronel’s, with Coronel setting the fastest first sector just as the rain began to fall in the second part of qualifying. With that, everyone’s first lap was the only lap that would count, with no improvements possible on anyone’s later runs.

It was a bad session for bamboo-engineering, victorious last time out at Salzburg, James Nash lost out in Q2 by setting only the 11th fastest time and will start there for both of tomorrow’s races, whilst team-mate Alex MacDowall was only 18th fastest and failed to make Q2.

Although Tom Chilton was on the pace with team-mate Yvan Muller in FP2 and Q1, where Chilton set the second fastest time behind Coronel, a mistake in Q2 saw the British driver down in 12th position.

Another big name to fall in Q1 was Castrol Honda Racing’s Tiago Monteiro. A water pump problem which curtailed his running time in FP2 reappeared in qualifying, and saw the Portuguese driver qualify in a lowly 21st position at the Moscow Raceway.

His Honda team-mate Gabriele Tarquini was able to go fifth fastest, but the fastest Honda was that of Zengõ Motorsport’s Norbert Michelisz, who set the fourth best time.

British driver Rob Huff qualified in third, setting the best times in sectors two and three as the rain fell in his Münnich Motorsport SEAT. The only other SEAT in the top 12 was that of Pepe Oriola, who qualified in seventh position.

Lada took their best qualifying result (not counting grid penalties) of the season, with James Thompson putting the Granta in sixth on the grid.

The two races tomorrow take place back-to-back with the first at 13:20 local time (11:20 CET).