A time of 1:33.096 minutes was good enough to see Finland’s Elias Seppänen (Landgraf Motorsport) secure his first pole position in the ADAC GT Masters in Saturday’s qualifying session at Circuit Zandvoort. “I am mega proud of this success. It means an awful lot to me and feels absolutely awesome. We want to use this great position in the race to claim our second win of the season,” said the happy pole-sitter. The Scandinavian shares the driving duties in the Mercedes-AMG GT3 with team-mate Tom Kalender (Hamm/Sieg), and will hand the car over to his German partner around the midway point of the race.
Second place, just 0.024 seconds slower than Seppänen, was David Schumacher in the Mercedes-AMG GT3 of Haupt Racing Team. The 22-year-old will be hunting down the race win alongside Salman Owega (Cologne). Benjamin Hites (Chile) and Tim Zimmermann (Langenargen) ended qualifying in third place in the Grasser Lamborghini, ahead of another Mercedes-AMG belonging to Jannes Fittje (Langenhain) and Finn Wiebelhaus (Obertshausen/both Haupt Racing Team). Completing the top five were the Swiss Ferrari duo of Alain Valente and Jean-Luc D´Auria from the Emil Frey Racing team.
The first qualifying at the 4.259-kilometre circuit got underway in temperatures around 14 degrees Celsius early on Saturday morning. In the first half of the session, German Juliano Holzem from the Land Motorsport team set the first fastest lap in his Audi R8 LMS GT3. As qualifying progressed, the multiple drivers swapped places at the top of the timings sheet, making for some exciting moments. Shortly before the end of the session, Seppänen produced his flying lap, which was just 0.053 seconds slower than the qualifying record set by Ricardo Feller (CHE) in 2021.
Saturday’s race on the Dutch North Sea coast gets underway at 15:15. Fans unable to make it to Zandvoort can follow all the action courtesy of television partner Sport1, which is showing race three of the season live and in full on German free-to-air TV. The race will also be streamed live and free of charge on the ADAC Motorsport YouTube channel, youtube.com/@ADACMotorsports.
