Jordi Gené: “It’s great to be on top where it all started”

Jordi Gené claimed the Pool Fast pole position at Jarama on Saturday morning, after improving his initial qualifying 1 lap time.

The Spaniard was beaming after the session, and particularly happy to have a good performance at a track he knows well.

“The truth is that the session went really well, I felt fast and saw I had a chance,” Gené told TouringCarTimes after the session. “The level of the championship is really high and in the team there is a great competitiveness, so it’s not so easy to be ahead.”

Cupra has dominated the season so far, arriving at its home race as both drivers’ and manufacturers’ leaders.

With that in mind, Gené wanted to perform well, and had some cards up his sleeve.

“This is my home race and I wanted a good result,” added the Spaniard. “After the first session I saw I could gain more time in a couple of places and I went for in in the qualifying 2.

“But this is the issue, here you see drivers who don’t know the track and are fast from the first lap, so I knew my first lap had to be good. I went for it and got the time, I’m really happy,” added the Cupra driver.

Jarama is a special circuit for Gené, as it’s where the Spaniard started his racing career.

“I came here as a kid with my father back in 1982,” he said.

“At the end of the day, they told him that I could do a lap ‘for fun’. I was just 12 years old, but they recorded my time as they had done with the others doing the driving course. When I returned to the pits, they asked me to do another lap because they thought the stopwatch was broken,” explained the Spaniard.

“But I did the second lap and it wasn’t a problem with the stopwatch, but rather that I had been much faster than all of them! Then came Emilio de Villota to talk to us about his racing school and that’s how it all started, so this is a special track for me.”