Make or break.
Welcome to Budapest and the Hungaroring for the penultimate and, in many cases, title defining (if not necessarily deciding) race of the season.
Pleasant conditions prevailed on Friday morning, with temperatures climbing through the mid-teens as the first hour-long Free Practice session ran its course.
It was a steady and largely incident-free session, the main casualty seemingly being the Ecurie Ecosse BMW which suffered some right rear damage just as the chequered flag came out (followed shortly by a red due to this incident) and Joe Twyman was rather rudely nerfed in the rear by the Prospeed Porsche and tipped into a spin coming out of the final bend.
Twyman, having just watched the onboard footage of the incident explained “there are two lines you can use on the final corner and I was on the wider one but that doesn’t mean there is room to come through there! I have no idea why he would just hit me up the back like that. It’s a bit of a set back because we had just been bedding in a new type of brake pad. We struggled with the brakes at Imola and Austria but the team tried these pads in the 24 hour race at Barcelona on the Aston Martin and they were fantastic. I don’t think we’ll struggle on the brakes now. I’ve never raced here before but it is a fantastic circuit and I really like it. Ollie [Millroy] has driven here a lot, mainly testing Formula BMW so he knows it well.” The damage is hopefully cosmetic because even with braking improvements the BMW men already have their work cut out this weekend to try to preserve a championship lead over the impressive SMP #69 and consistent AF Corse #62 Ferrari F458 Italia GT3s.
The sister #72 SMP Racing Ferrari was the GTC starlet in Free Practice 1 though, capturing the limelight by losing a wheel at T6 and then recovering to the pits where Luca Persiani took it back out on track to dominate the last third of the session and finish quickest on a 1:47.684. #69 finished second in class (an SMP Racing 1-2, which would be perfect for a championship push with the order reversed), then a good showing for the #60 Kox Lamborghini in third, #62 fourth and #79 fifth.
The good news for SMP Racing also continued in the headline P2 class. The team have clearly found a large chunk of the pace they were searching for on the car’s debut last time out in Austria and in fact Maurizio Mediani had the #37 Oreca 03 Nissan heading the class and posting fastest overall sectors numerous times in the first half of the session, despite many teams having their quicker drivers out. They finished the session fifth, but only 1.1 seconds off the fastest time.
That fastest time was set by Nelson Panciatici late on. He confirmed that the Signatech Alpine team’s objective is victory in Hungary but that to secure that they may need pole position too. “It is similar to Austria, qualifying will be very important, in fact probably most important here. In Austria, the penalty from qualifying [demoting them to the back of the grid] I think cost us the race and I do not think it was particularly fair because quite a lot of drivers improved during the yellow flag. Anyway, I think we can have a good race here and challenge for the win.”
Murphy Prototypes gave Jonathan Hirschi some good seat time in the #18 Oreca Nissan and he rewarded this with top-three pace, before Niederhauser (#34 Race Performance Oreca 03 Judd) and Ragues (#36 Signatech Alpine) started swapping times and places ahead of him. Hartley took over the Murphy car and instantly started setting fastest sectors. It was no surprise to see him fastest overall with a 1:37.994 on a lap where he went half a second faster than anyone else had in P2 so far. And the ‘anyone else’ had been him too… His next lap was even better, with a further 2/10ths shaved off the middle sector and his best of a 1:36.606 was only trumped later by Panciatici’s 1:37.529.
Oliver Turvey didn’t get a great deal of running in Jota’s #38 Zytek Z11SN Nissan but he did manage some quickest first sectors (sector one containing most of the quicker parts of the circuit) and finished the session only 3/10ths off in third. Fourth was Thiriet by TDS, but nearly a second further back. Whilst it is possible to read far too much into a practice session, this is the first time this season that the championship leaders haven’t seemed to find an abundance of pace straight out of the trailer.
In GTE JMW dominated in the #66 Ferrari F458 Italia with a relatively early 1:45.343 for Bertolini on only the car’s ninth lap. This, even by the end of the session, was still 8/10ths quicker than Tandy in the #77 Proton Porsche, followed by Prospeed’s #75 Porsche (Collard), IMSA’s #67 (Vernay) and RAM’s pair of Ferrari F458s, which had the air of running through programmes rather than going for laptimes so far.
In PC, the only change to the expected entry is that regular driver Gary Hirsch is indeed back with Paul Loup Chatin in #49 rather than the listed Alex Loan, which means that he too can continue to fight for the championship alongside Chatin. Chatin confirmed that “it is expected that Gary will remain in the car for [the final round at] Paul Ricard. Nicky Catsburg and the Algarve Pro Racing Team are back though and once again he topped the times in class, 8/10ths ahead of Chatin. Chatin and Ayari will have to fight for the win.
Algarve Pro Racing won’t be at the final round at Paul Ricard in a fortnight as things stand however due to existing driver commitments, unless some drivers with a suitable budget can come forwards to take on the car very quickly that is.
PS
