Nathaniel Powers took his fifth pole position of the season in qualifying for the Austrian V-Prix just ahead of team mate Klaas van Snelheid, in a session that was interrupted three times by red flags. Following the rain yesterday in practice and more overnight, a green track greeted the drivers and ensured the fight for pole position would go to the dying seconds of the session as the track got quicker.
Lewis Ellington surprised many by heading the times early on and remaining there for around half of the session, including during the first red flag stoppage in which Felix Beyer crashed after spinning into the pit wall while exiting the final corner. Arden Hutchinson managed to jump to the top of the times sheets but was the only improvement before the second red flag, when Finn Schnyder and James Harding clashed at turn two. The Lopez driver launched an audacious move up the inside which proved a day late and a dollar short, and took both cars out of qualifying. As the session restarted for a third time Klaas proved the pace Downton have had all season by lapping three tenths quicker than Hutchinson, an important lap as he'd previously been languishing in fifteenth position with just eighteen minutes of the session remaining. It wasn't long however before Powers jumped his team mate, as he's done so often in qualifying this season by the usual margin of less than a tenth of a second, just before the third and final red flag came out after Ellington crashed. The Holmqvist driver had set purple times in the first two sectors before riding the kerb exiting turn seven and over-correcting a slide, throwing him into the outside barrier in a heavy accident. With just two minutes remaining on the clock once the session restarted it was a dash to the line to get a final lap in, with Klaas notably just missing the cut by three seconds. The final laps for Adrien Simon and Oleksandr Zozulya gained them both ground to fourth and fifth, the latter jumping from a lowly seventeenth place and salvaging his weekend. See below for full qualifying classification and grid with tyre choices for the race:
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