The 25-year-old Callaway Competition driver managed to post a time of 1:31.616 minutes on Friday afternoon, and as a result, was 16 thousandths of a second quicker than Mercedes-AMG driver Jeroen Bleekemolen had been in FP1.

"The day went pretty well," said Kirchhöfer, who shares the Corvette C7 GT3-R with Markus Pommer. "It's a little surprising that we're fastest, as we've experimented a lot with the car's setup today. It's hard to say where we stand at the moment, but Most is a track, on which I feel very much at ease and it suits the car too. Qualifying will be an important factor tomorrow, because overtaking is not easy here."

Bleekemolen and Jimmy Eriksson, his partner in the Zakspeed-Mercedes-AMG, also showed a strong performance in the second session and were only marginally slower than Kirchhöfer with a 1:31.642. Third place went to the MRS BMW of Nicolai Sylvest and Jens Klingmann, who posted a time of 1:32.662 minutes.

Indy Dontje and Maximilian Götz finished fourth in the Mercedes AMG. They missed the session best time by 63 thousandths of a second. Ricardo Feller and Dries Vanthoor in fifth place were only another six-thousandths of a second slower in the best-placed Audi R8 LMS.