At the Hungaroring, Rene Rast secured his maiden DTM position. In qualifying for the Saturday race, the 30-year-old Audi works driver beat the opposition and set the fastest time of 1m34.742s. Rast’s maiden pole position also marks the first pole position for Audi in the 2017 DTM season.
The brand from Ingolstadt showed a strong overall performance in qualifying with a clean sweep of the top five as Jamie Green, Mattias Ekström, Nico Müller and Mike Rockenfeller followed in second to fifth place behind Rast.
Augusto Farfus was the fastest BMW driver in sixth place. The Brazilian was 0.533 seconds down on Rast’s fastest time. Behind seventh-placed Loïc Duval, the current DTM points’ leader Lucas Auer ended up eighth as the fastest Mercedes-AMG driver. Gary Paffett (Mercedes-AMG) and Tom Blomqvist (BMW) rounded out the top ten.
“I am mega happy. This is something one can hardly describe. Pole position is very unexpected for me.” Said Rast “So far, I have improved every race weekend. It didn’t look too good at the beginning with P9 on the first set of tyres, but I also had some traffic.”
“I was still eight tenths of a seconds down on pole. With the second set of tyres, it worked out much better, that was just great.” He added
The fifth race of the DTM season starts on Saturday at 14.45 hrs. ARD is broadcasting live from 14.20 hrs.