Porsche works driver Mathieu Jaminet secured pole position for Sunday’s ADAC GT Masters race in Oschersleben.
The Frenchman, who lines up alongside defending champion Michael Ammermüller for the 2020 championship-winning team SSR Performance, clocked a time of 1:23.311 minutes in the second half of the 20-minute session to take his place at the front of the field. He then improved that time by four thousandths of a second on his next lap, before setting the fastest time of the morning: 1:23.112 minutes. This is Jaminet’s second pole position in Oschersleben: in 2017, making his debut in the series, he immediately put his car on the front space of the grid at the 3.667-kilometre circuit. As reward for today’s pole-setting performance, Jaminet receives a voucher for a set of Pirelli tyres.
“An awesome session,” said the 2018 champion. “We did not have the best day yesterday, so it is great to bounce back. The key was managing the traffic correctly. My engineer sent me out at the right time. I was able to push for several laps and to improve consistently. A lot can happen at the start and in the race. We will be cautious, but are aiming for the win.”
0.160 seconds behind the Frenchman was Maro Engel in second place in the Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo. Engel is sharing the car with Luca Stolz. Third place went to the Audi R8 LMS of Charles Weerts and Dries Vanthoor. Vanthoor was just 0.224 seconds off the fastest time. Marvin Kirchhöfer and Jeffrey Schmidt qualified fourth in their Corvette C7 GT3-R. “That came as a surprise to us, so I am very happy,” said Callaway driver Kirchhöfer. “We had very little time to prepare, but have been improving systematically since Thursday. Hats off to the team: they spent all night pondering over what we could still improve, and the little changes to the set-up paid off.” With Porsche, Mercedes-AMG, Audi and Corvette, four different manufacturers occupy the first four places on the grid.
Completing the top five is former F1 driver Markus Winkelhock, who lines up alongside Florian Spengler in the Car Collection Motorsport Audi. Saturday’s winners, Raffaele Marciello and Maximilian Buhk (Mann-Filter Team Landgraf – HTP/WWR), led qualifying early on in their Mercedes-AMG, but eventually had to settle for sixth place.