Felix Rosenqvist has undone a weekend of Audi domination to claim pole position for the Blancpain GT Series Sprint Cup’s Qualifying race at the Hungaroring.
The Team AKKA-ASP Mercedes AMG GT3 racer set the best time of the weekend, a 1:42.433, in the final ten minute shoot-out which saw almost every participant claim top spot at some point.
However, while a lot of drivers took top spot a lot of drivers saw their laps deleted because of track limits meaning Laurens Vanthoor found himself initially on pole in the Belgian Audi Club Team WRT Audi R8 LMS as one of the few who managed a clean lap.
That said, the Belgian couldn’t enjoy his time at the top for long as Team WRT teammate Christopher Mies strung a good lap together and pushed his car onto provisional pole position.
Felix Rosenqvist though had his dander up after seeing his last lap deleted and ended up improving his personal best by 0.5s to jump over Mies and onto the inside of the front-row by just seven-hundredths of a second.
Also setting a late flyer was Dominik Baumann who himself had a stint on pole before settling for third place in the AMG-Team HTP Motorsport Mercedes AMG GT3.
It was notable that the first eight cars on the grid were either a Mercedes or an Audi with Vanthoor finishing fourth, Christopher Haase fifth for Sainteloc Racing, Jules Szymkowiak sixth for HTP Motorsport and Filip Salaquada seventh for ISR Racing. The first of the non-German cars was the GRT Grasser Racing Team Lamborghini Huracan GT3 of Mirko Bortolotti who was only 0.693s off Rosenqvist’s pole time.
Elsewhere, 13th place saw the fastest of the Bentley Team M-Sport Bentley Continental GT3s as Vincent Abril set a 1:43.252 to qualify just behind the fastest Silver Cup entry of Alessio Picariello in the Phoenix Racing Audi.
10th place was the fastest in Pro-Am Cup as Morgan Moullin-Traffort didn’t have the pace to compete with his rivals in the ten minute shoot-out and settled for 10th in the AKKA ASP Mercedes.