Oman’s Al-Faisal Al-Zubair and Khalid Al-Wahaibi impressed in qualifying for round four of the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup at the world-famous Silverstone circuit on Saturday evening.
Lechner Racing Team Middle East’s Al-Zubair set a best lap of 2min 04.296sec in his 10-lap qualifying run on the 5.891km Northamptonshire circuit, earning an impressive 11th on the grid between Austrian race winner Thomas Preining and Dino Zamperelli.
Al-Wahaibi, who made his Supercup debut last weekend in Spielberg, followed up with a solid session to qualify 21st with a best lap of 2min 05.180sec.
Rookie Florian Latorre built on his second-fastest practice time to take pole from series leader Michael Ammermüller with a lap of 2min 03.636sec. Dylan Pereira qualified third and Mattia Drudi fourth.
It was a very good qualifying session for me, P11, on this tough grid with five guest drivers, including British drivers. It was a good job to qualify P11 and six-tenths off the fastest and we should be proud of that. I am very happy. Other than Monaco, this is the first qualifying that I am happy with. Race day is a different day. I think we have a really good set of used tyres for the race and we can push on from there.
Al-Faisal Al-Zubair
Al-Wahaibi, who turns 18 on Sunday, was looking for more.
It was definitely an improvement from Austria. However, I was not too happy with the lap and there was space for more improvement. On the first set (tyres), we didn’t put a lap together and that upset the rhythm. On the second set, the red flag came out and that completely ruined my chances of improving. It could have been quite a lot better.
Khalid Al-Wahaibi
What happens, happens, and you have to live with it and you have to keep looking forward. Austria only has eight or nine corners, but Silverstone has many more and they are different types of corners. Some are really quick and you need to be able to manage them. Traffic was a huge problem after the red flag and everyone was stacking up into the last two corners to try and get the gap. I guess it’s good to have a birthday on race day but we will be focused on the race and the celebrations can happen afterwards, depending upon the result.
Khalid Al-Wahaibi
Practice
Larry ten Voorde topped Friday evening’s practice session with a 2min 03.755sec, 0.065 seconds faster than fellow rookie Latorre, with Ammermüller third and Drudi fourth.
Al-Zubair completed 16 laps with a best of 2min 04.931sec for 17th of 33 entrants, while Al-Wahaibi also ran 16 laps, with a best of 2min 05.863sec for 25th.
The race runs before the British Grand Prix at 10.25hrs on Sunday morning.