The first fastest time of the “long” weekend of the Porsche Carrera Cup Italia is 1’50″870 and belongs to Alberto Cerqui, who is already on track today at the Mugello Circuit for the tests preceding the third round of the season, the mid-championship one, which will take place from tomorrow to Sunday.
In a late morning with high temperatures (at midday 29 degrees in the air but above all almost 50 on the asphalt), the 2021 champion and BeDriver standard bearer achieved the fastest lap in the first two hours of testing held with all 33 entrants to the event and was the only one to break the 1:51 wall, with the track that overall seemed faster than in last week’s tests.
Lapping in 51 net, less than two tenths behind Cerqui, Keagan Masters (Team Q8 Hi Perform) and Gianmarco Quaresmini (Tsunami RT) finished, while the duelists of the Rookie classification, Francesco Braschi (Dinamic Motorsport) and Lirim Zendeli (Ombra Racing), also found themselves in the top-5, both 3 tenths behind the morning leader.
The two biggest surprises of the round, however, came from Bayley Hall and Flavio Olivieri. The young Australian from BeDriver was sixth, half a second behind his more experienced teammate, but with a slightly faster ideal lap, thanks above all to the best split times obtained in the first 3 sectors of the 4 into which the Tuscan track was divided by the timekeepers of Perugia Timing.
The 17-year-old Raptor Engineering driver, on the other hand, closed the morning with the seventh best time, 6 tenths behind Cerqui. For Olivieri and the Modena team, a good result obtained already on the first lap with new Michelins, but which is especially important for the fact that the Roman rookie is making his absolute debut at Mugello on a race weekend, given that he tasted it for the first time only last week and has not even raced there in the single-seater season.
Another rookie, Nicholas Pujatti, who will turn 17 next December and is the youngest of the group, completed the top 10 at 7 tenths of a second. With the 911 GT3 Cup of Villorba Corse he was preceded by the reigning champion Larry Ten Voorde, eighth with Fulgenzi Racing, and by the two-time champion Simone Iaquinta, ninth with Prima Ghinzani, both working on the set-ups to adopt for the weekend and 6 tenths of a second behind Cerqui.
With a time of 1’52″256, Alberto De Amicis was the fastest among the contenders in the Michelin Cup. The Ebimotors driver and reigning champion of the category is 15th overall in the general list and in class precedes Alex De Giacomi (Tsunami RT, 7 tenths behind), Gianluca Giorgi (BeDriver), his teammate Paolo Gnemmi, the home driver Stefano Stefanelli (Team Malucelli) and another home driver, the Florentine Cosimo Barberini, currently 1″6 behind De Amicis and after many experiences in Tourism now busy with his debut in Carrera Cup Italia with the Prima Ghinzani team.
Having said that at the moment Francesco Fenici, current leader of the Michelin Cup with Raptor Engineering, concluded the morning test in seventh place in his category, in the afternoon everyone will be back on the track for the second round, scheduled from 16.10 to 18.10.
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