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Sirotkin beats Gasly to GP2 pole in Germany

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2016 GP2 Series Round 7 Hockenheimring, Hockenheim, Germany Friday 29 July 2016. Sergey Sirotkin (RUS, ART Grand Prix) Photo: Sam Bloxham/GP2 Series Media Service. ref: Digital Image _SBB9498

Sam Bloxham

Sergey Sirotkin continued his mid-season revival by scoring pole position for Saturday’s GP2 Series feature race at Hockenheim.

Sirotkin picked up his first win of the season in Hungary last Sunday, rising to eighth place in the drivers’ championship in the process after a luckless start to the year.

Red Bull junior driver Pierre Gasly enjoyed the upper-hand for much of the qualifying session, setting two laps good enough for pole before returning to the pit lane and getting out of his car, believing he had done all he could.

As a result, the Frenchman was left unable to respond when Sirotkin put in a lap of 1:22.193, going one-hundredth of a second faster to snatch away pole for ART Grand Prix.

“It is the first time I’ve been to the track, so I didn’t have much expectation before we came here, and free practice didn’t go super good so you’re thinking more about getting a top three than getting a pole,” Sirotkin said.

“The first set of tires was pretty good but we were missing a bit of time to Pierre at that moment, but with every lap on the track I felt better and better, so we were quite confident for the second run.

“Unfortunately there was a bit of a mess on the warm up to the first push, so I just stopped pushing, did a cool lap, and the last lap I knew most of the people would not be as quick and I just pushed like crazy.

“I think I just squeezed everything I could from the situation. Probably we were not simply the quickest car, but we made it by putting it all together perfectly, every inch.”

Raffaele Marciello qualified third for Russian Time ahead of Prema’s Antonio Giovinazzi, while Oliver Rowland bounced back from a disastrous weekend in Hungary to qualify fifth.

Alex Lynn will start sixth for DAMS on Saturday ahead of Norman Nato and Nicholas Latifi. Jordan King and Marvin Kirchhofer rounded out the top 10 for Racing Engineering and Carlin respectively.

Saturday’s GP2 feature race is live on the NBC Sports app and online at f1stream.nbcsports.com from 9:40am ET on Saturday.

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