Yvan Muller claims his first pole position of the year at Pau Arnos

Cyan Racing driver Yvan Muller set the fastest lap time in the qualifying session at Pau Arnos to claim his first pole position of the year.

“First pole position of the season, it was time!” said Muller after the session. “It was a clean lap, we always think it could be better, but I’m happy with that.”

Muller set a best lap time of 1:18.973 behind the wheel of his Lynk & Co 03 TCR.

Jean-Karl Vernay was the fourth driver to complete a lap in Q3, taking his Hyundai Elantra N TCR to second place, 0.233 seconds behind Muller.

BRC Motorsport’s Norbert Michelisz climbed to third place aboard his Elantra N TCR, 0.262 seconds off the pace.

Santiago Urrutia qualified in fourth position, 1.120 seconds behind Muller, while points leader Yann Ehrlacher made a mistake on his lap that put him in fifth and last position of Q3, 1.360 seconds off the pace.

“I was on used tyres, so I knew it would be a bad qualifying,” said Ehrlacher after the session, “but I hope it will stay clean and have good racing tomorrow.”

Esteban Guerrieri (Honda Civic) just missed out on the Q3 session, ending up in sixth place: “We couldn’t expect that much better, but we can see that the blue cars still had something left”.

Néstor Girolami was seventh with the second Honda Civic from Münnich Motorsport, just alongside Gabriele Tarquini in eighth place.

Cyan Racing’s Thed Björk qualified in ninth place with the Lynk & Co. 03, with Frédéric Vervisch in tenth position with his Audi RS 3 LMS, thus claiming the reversed grid pole.

Tiago Monteiro (Honda Civic) just missed out on the reversed grid pole in eleventh position.

The Q1 session was red flagged after five minutes as Comtoyou Racing’s Gilles Magnus spun off the track and crashed into the barriers with his Audi RS 3 LMS. The session was restarted after a 15-minute recovery operation.

The Cupras struggled with the added 20kg of compensation weight for this weekend, with Rob Huff the fastest driver for the Spanish manufacturer in 14th place.

Title contender Mikel Azcona changed tyres for a last attempt, but couldn’t return to the track in time to complete a last flying lap and will start both races from 16th place.

The start of the WTCR Race 1 is scheduled for 10:15 CEST on Sunday morning.