Las Vegas GP || November 23 || 22h00 (Local time)

Hungaroring, Qualifying : López flies to WTCC pole

He beats Coronel by a large gap

By Emmanuel Touzot

23 April 2016 - 17:36

Citroën driver López was quickest in all three sectors on his lap in the Q3 shoot-out for the DHL-presented pole position to set a time of 1m46.109s, beating the benchmark set by Coronel by 0.609 seconds.

Chevrolet RML Cruze driver Coronel equalled his career-best qualifying result, the WTCC Trophy contender beating Honda drivers Rob Huff and Tiago Monteiro to a place on the front row. Polestar’s Thed Björk made Q3 and was a close fifth behind the two Hondas.

Hungarian hero Norbert Michelisz just missed out on a place in Q3 and will start the Main Race from sixth. Nicky Catsburg will share row four of the grid with Yvan Muller, with Fredrik Ekblom and Mehdi Bennani on row five.

Tom Chilton and Gabriele Tarquini missed out on the top 10 and will start both races from the sixth row of the grid.

In Q1, Muller only just avoided being eliminated, with Hugo Valente instead failing to make the top 12, together with John Filippi, Grégoire Demoustier, René Münnich and Ferenc Ficza.

Pos.	Driver	Team	Car	Q1 time	Q2 time	Q3 time
1	Jose Maria Lopez	Citroen Total WTCC	Citroen	1:46.261	1:46.399	1:46.109
2	Tom Coronel	ROAL Motorsport	Chevrolet	1:46.929	1:46.457	1:46.718
3	Rob Huff	Honda Racing Team JAS	Honda	1:46.706	1:46.349	1:46.833
4	Tiago Monteiro	Honda Racing Team JAS	Honda	1:46.843	1:46.419	1:46.895
5	Thed Bjork	Polestar Cyan	Volvo	1:46.722	1:46.493	1:46.980
—	----------	--------	--------	--------	---------	---------
6	Norbert Michelisz	Honda Racing Team JAS	Honda	1:46.920	1:46.597
7	Nicky Catsburg	LADA Sport	Lada	1:46.859	1:46.725
8	Yvan Muller	Citroen Total WTCC	Citroen	1:47.358	1:46.824
9	Fredrik Ekblom	Polestar Cyan	Volvo	1:46.993	1:46.831
10	Mehdi Bennani	Sebastien Loeb Racing	Citroen	1:46.813	1:47.078
11	Tom Chilton	Sebastien Loeb Racing	Citroen	1:47.247	1:47.159
12	Gabriele Tarquini	LADA Sport	Lada	1:46.633	1:47.170
—	----------	--------	--------	--------	---------	---------
13	Hugo Valente	LADA Sport	Lada	1:47.484	2:05.022
14	John Filippi	Campos Racing	Chevrolet	1:47.704
15	Grégoire Demoustier	Sebastien Loeb Racing	Citroen	1:47.751
16	Rene Munnich	Munnich Motorsport	Chevrolet	1:47.900
17	Ferenc Ficza	Zengo	Honda	1:48.707