Werner seals pole with 'awesome' lap.

German sensation blitzes St. Petersburg street-circuit to claim pole.

by Chris HayesMarco Werner led an awe-inspiring charge on the St. Petersburg street circuit Friday, seizing pole-position for Saturday's Acura Sports Car Challenge in his Audi R10 TDI with a record-breaking lap and gifting his team with its second consecutive front-row spot of the season.The 42-year-old stormed around the twisty 1.8 mile track dazzling the city crowd with a time of 1 minute 02.825 seconds, seven tenths of a second faster than his closest rival and six tenths faster than Allan McNish's best time around the track in 2007.That was a really good qualifying session! exulted Werner afterwards. I pushed hard and I am proud for Champion Racing and Audi to be on pole position.Three-times American Le Mans Series Champion, Lucas Luhr, who partners Werner in the Audi, hailed the record-breaking lap as 'awesome'.Marco did a fantastic job. Congratulations, I tip my hat. He really did an awesome lap, applauded the ALMS champ.The all-German Werner-Luhr partnership will line up ahead of the Penske Racing paring of Romain Dumas and Timo Bernhard in the LMP2 classed Porsche RS Spyder.I'm extremely surprised that we are on pole position and that we have achieved a time like that, disclosed Audi Sport's Director Dave Maraj after the all-important qualifying session.I think that Marco did an extremely good job, the engineers and the team did also a great job getting the car to work well. I'm really very happy. Now, we've got to reach a good result tomorrow.However, Frank Biela in the sister Audi R10 TDI had a less encouraging day winding up ninth fastest with a lap time of 1m 04.577, over two seconds slower than Werner.The 43-year-old, who is racing at St. Petersburg for the first time, struggled with a lack of grip and was unable to get the best out of the harder tyre compound.I'm definitely not satisfied, griped the German, It is the first time that I'm here and it was not so easy to adapt to everything.Plus, we had a little lack of grip in slow corners. We have to find out why this was the case and to sort it out by tomorrow on race day.Race partner Emanuele Pirro echoed Biela's grief stressing the need to get something extra out of the Audi in Saturday's race.Regarding our car, we went for a different tyre choice and for a harder compound which I think is a better choice for the race. But this is not all. We've got something to find out to have a good performance for tomorrow.

 
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