Isidro Callejas quickest in Norisring practice as rain continues

Volcano Motorsport’s Isidro Callejas bounced back in style from his practice one crash to top TCR Europe practice two at the Norisring.

A clash with RC2 Junior Team’s Rubén Fernández at the turn two hairpin brought out red flags in the Friday morning session and left both drivers hoping their teams could fix their cars time for the afternoon’s action.

That proved to be the case, and it was a similar story to the earlier session when the track was at its wettest as Marco Butti and Callejas were the fastest two drivers. Eventually the rain worsened to the point where no lap time improvements were going to occur at the top of the order, and Callejas ended the session with an advantage of 0.014 seconds over Élite Motorsport’s Butti.

The gap between the pair had been 0.317s after the first 10 minutes, but Butti was able to make a big improvement to get to just 0.015s behind Callejas and then he set a new personal best by one thousandth of a second to settle with the end margin.

By that point Callejas was already out of his Cupra Leon Competición and observing the action on the pit wall, having bedded in the brakes and tyres he needed to for later in the weekend when it is set to be dry.

The pitlane was busy through much of practice two as drivers changed tyres. However it was rarely full sets being replaced, rather a swapping of the front and rear tyres after usually one timed lap. Target Competition’s Josh Files had already done all of that work in practice one, and he decided to forgo the afternoon session entirely.

The worsening weather meant the practice order behind the top two was on the most part set a long time before the end, bar Viktor Davidovski jumping up to fourth place at the end behind Comtoyou Racing team-mate Franco Girolami.

Behind the two Audi RS 3 LMS II drivers was Halder Motorsport’s Honda Civic Type R TCR-driving duo Mike Halder and Jack Young, Klim Gavrilov (Volcano) and Michelle Halder (Halder) set identical personal best lap times in seventh and eighth, and only 0.043s behind then was Nicola Bandan (Target) in ninth.

Next up is qualifying, starting at 11:40 CEST tomorrow.