San Luis Raceway qualifying report

Second pole for Martínez in 2003 at San Luis raceway

San Luis, November 1st.- Second visit of TC 2000 to San Luis, second pole position for Omar Martínez and his works Toyota Corolla. The TTA driver was the best of 28 competitors this afternoon, adding another fastest time to the one he got at Resistencia a few months ago.

Both the training sessions in the morning and the Qualifying sessions later were full of red flags due to dirt in the track which caused mayhem and strange manouvres among most of the field.

Martínez was closely followed at 0.013s by the Ford Focus of Walter Hernández. Hernández held the top place in the iming screens for long, but the Toyota was able to improve those few tenths of a second which put the former TC 2000 champion on pole.

Martín Basso was also quick with his Honda Racing Argentina's Civic in third, but the gap from him on was larger than half a second (0.637s). Nelson García's Ford Escort Zetec got fourth place in front of Norberto Fontana (Toyota Corolla), Crispín Beitía (Ford Escort Zetec) -over one second behind Martínez-, Guillermo Ortelli (Honda Civic), Christian Ledesma (Chevrolet Astra), championship leader Gabriel Ponce de León (Ford Focus) and Gabriel Furlán (Mitsubishi Lancer).

Toyotas are giving their best, but Ford has tested intensively during the week at the Cabalén circuit near their premises in Córdoba, so they do not want the blue oval drivers Ponce de León and Hernández to lose the top two spots in the series.

Six laps heats are expected tomorrow at 10:00 and 10:30, with the main event (29 laps, 133.748 kilometres or 60 minutes) scheduled a 12:40.

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