Rene Rast has taken pole position for the Saturday DTM race at the Nürburgring. The championship leader topped the time sheets with a time of 01:19:642, which was enough to beat BMW's Bruno Spengler for the top spot.
The Canadian set a time of 01:19:822, which left him a mere 0.180s behind Rast's Audi. In third is championship hopeful Nico Müller. Müller, who now sits 22 points behind Rast in the championship standings, initially struggled with the temperature in his Hankook tyres.
He ended the first set of laps in seventh place before improving to third. He will start next to veteran Mike Rockenfeller, who topped the timing sheets on two occasions but ultimately had to settle for fourth place.
The session proved to be a close affair, with the top seven of runners seperated by less than half a second. Team WRT rookie Jonathan Aberdein showed promising pace early on, topping the sheets twice. In the end, his fastest time of 01:19:943 had him complete the top five, three-tenths behind Rast.
This put him ahead of BMW runners Sheldon van der Linde and Timo Glock in sixth and seventh. The top ten was completed by Loic Duval, Jamie Green and Robin Frijns.
Marco Wittmann had a difficult and forgettable qualifying session, managing no better than eleventh place ahead of Pietro Fittipaldi and Philipp Eng, who was struck by a suspected gearbox issue late in the session, forcing him to park his BMW M4 DTM but qualifying thirteenth.
The grid was completed by Paul di Resta, Joel Eriksson, Jake Dennis, Daniel Juncadella and Ferdinand von Habsburg. The latter decided not to go out for a second set of laps in order to save tyres for this afternoon's race.
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