One week on from a historic hatrick for Scuderia Ferrari at Le Mans, Porsche and co. look to defend their glory on home soil. It’s the one and only 24 Hours of the Nurburgring, and it promises to be a brilliant one at that. But who will be victorious in the most unpredictable race of the year?

Top Qualifying posed many questions, most notably who would be bestowed with the honour – and indeed pressure – of putting their car on pole and justifying their crew’s decision. First in line was Nick Thiim for Walkenhorst Motorsport’s #34 Aston Martin who would have a truly clear track ahead of him as the session began. But even before the cars reached the Nordschleife there was drama. Nico Menzel’s #33 Falken Porsche suffered a puncture halfway round the Grand Prix lap, throwing its entire session into jeopardy. It meant that the car only had one flying lap with which to set its time, compared to everyone else who had two flying laps. In the pits the issues worsened, as the apparent puncture had caused the cars brakes to jam, meaning the team would have even less time available to them. Repairs took a few minutes, with the silver lining being they would have an uninterrupted running.

Meanwhile for the #17 GetSpeed Mercedes, they’d have their fastest lap time in the session removed thanks to a pitlane speed limit violation prior to the session starting. Adam Christodoulou would have an even tougher job in this session.

But the bigger job would be for the #16 Scherer Sport PHX mechanics, as Laurens Vanthoor suffered a huge accident that completely totalled after losing the car over the high speed Schwedenkreutz corner, ending the car’s session and bringing out the red flag. Vanthoor was luckily able to walk away from an incredibly scary impact, the car nearly rolling onto roof as it headed towards the barriers. The session was subsequently paused while barrier repairs were carried out.

Ninety minutes later the session would be restarted, the cars lining up in the same order with the same drivers nominated to qualify them.

Kevin Estre looked to be running the strongest, with four purple sectors on his opening lap as Thiim’s #34 Aston set a benchmark time of 8.19.396. Thomas Neubauer then surprisingly put his #45 Realize Ferrari, the only of the session, fastest with a 8.13.909, just three tenths ahead of Nico Menzel. The Ferrari’s provisional pole was snatched away by Estre, who set five purple sectors on his way to provisional pole 8.12.741, a full second clear of the entire field. Maro Engel went third in his #14 Bilstien Mercedes, but it was Porsche’s Kevin Estre to give Stuttgart its first pole at this race in seven years. There was drama fruther back for the #11 of Jay Hartling which stopped on track before it could even set a time. With the earlier delay meaning only one lap was allotted to each team, Kevin Estre was the driver of the hour as he went into pole position.

That was fast, frenetic and historic for Porsche and it’s only making me more excited for tommorow’s race. Everything’s done now, all that’s left for these teams is to wait twenty four hours more before the most gruelling race in the world begins.

I’ll see you then!

thumbnail credit – Philipp Ganjon, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons