Thed Björk edges championship rivals to score crucial Macau pole
FIA TCR World Tour title contender Thed Björk closed in on championship leader Norbert Michelisz with a crucial pole position in a tense final qualifying session of the year in Macau.
Lynk & Co Cyan Racing driver Björk came out on top by just 23 thousandths of a second over fellow title rival Mikel Azcona, with the BRC Hyundai N Squadra Corse Spaniard in turn edging two other remaining championship protagonists in Yann Ehrlacher (Lynk & Co Cyan Racing) and Michelisz (BRC Hyundai N Squadra Corse). Esteban Guerrieri, the final remaining title contender, was sixth for GOAT Racing.
Néstor Girolami qualified fifth in the third BRC Hyundai N Squadra Corse Elantra, but is now mathematically out of the title race.
Qualifying provided all the usual Macau drama, this time with the added twist of heavily changeable weather – setting up a last-gasp shootout for pole in the first fully-dry conditions seen all weekend.
Q1 in particular was full of incidents, the first of which saw Interlagos and Zhuzhou pole-setter Santiago Urrutia run into trouble. Urrutia suffered a technical issue that forced him to park up in the run-off area at Moorish Hill, triggering the first red flag of the session. Urrutia climbed out of his Lynk & Co Cyan Racing machine and the car was wheeled away by the marshals.
The Uruguayan will start both of this weekend’s races from 32nd and last on the grid and is now also officially out of championship contention.
As Urrutia pulled off, Azcona took over at the top of the timesheets just as the red flag was called, leading a BRC Hyundai 1-2-3 halfway through Q1.
As the session resumed, it did so on a drying track, with purple sectors immediately lighting up the timing screens.
Azcona blitzed his earlier best with a 2:41.705, and with a dry racing line clearly appearing, the field headed into the pits for slick tyres.
Before the first slick laps were completed, however, Lo Sze Ho spun his Evolve Racing Hyundai at the slippery Melco hairpin, causing a second red flag interruption with 8:27 left on the clock.
The timing of this stoppage left several key players seriously exposed, with Ehrlacher 15th, Michelisz 16th, Björk 21st and Guerrieri 26th, neither having completed a lap in representative conditions.
All championship contenders eventually made the top 12 cut to Q2 as the session resumed, however, crucially dodging a final bullet when a third – session-ending – red flag was called following a major impact at San Francisco Hill for 326 Racing Team’s Fan Yi Wu.
One who did not make it through was 11-time Macau race winner Rob Huff, who encountered traffic on his crucial last run and was left a frustrated 15th in the Volcano Motorsport Audi RS 3 LMS TCR.
For Q2 the track was now essentially fully dry, but it didn’t take long for yet another incident to take place.
This time it was due to a hard barrier-strike at Paiol for Marco Butti, who not only inflicted significant damage on his own GOAT Racing Honda but also compromised his tailgating team-mates, Guerrieri and Dušan Borković, who both made light contact with the stricken Italian as they squeezed through on the narrow mountain section.
The stoppage left 10:23 to play with when running resumed, and it was Björk who eventually came out on top by a fraction – bagging the maximum 15 qualifying points on offer. That could well prove crucial in the championship fight, with Björk now advancing from third to second in the standings and closing to within ten points of leader Michelisz (280 vs 270).
Guerrieri is third on 266 points, Ehrlacher fourth on 259, and Azcona fifth on 257.
With the top ten in Q2 reversed on the Race 2 grid, Andy Yan will start the final race on Sunday from pole position ahead of Martin Cao and Ma Qing Hua.
Race 1 is scheduled for 12:35 local time (05:35 CET) on Saturday.
