The second Free Practice session at the Circuit Barcelona-Catalunya saw the Halder Motorsport Honda Civic Type R of Jack Young set the fastest time with Josh Files second quickest in a Target Competition Hyundai Elantra N and another Elantra, the Aggressive Team Italia car of Pepe Oriola, in third.

The first competitive lap time was set by Frédéric Vervisch who lapped in 1:57.661, with Klim Gavrilov second fastest (1:58.512). Vervisch then improved his time on the next lap with a 1:56.464 while Isidro Callejas went P2 (1:56.706) before being edged out by Franco Girolami (1:56.510).

Several drivers then went faster than Vervisch, with Pepe Oriola (1:55.731) just ahead of John Filippi (1:56.236) before Jack Young went fastest with a lap of 1:54.756, becoming the first driver to break the 1:55 benchmark. Girolami then improved his best time to briefly go P4 (1:56.429) before his teammate Tom Coronel went P3 with a 1:55.903 and Nicola Baldan then went fourth fastest with a lap of 1:56.234. Josh Files then went P2 (1:55.434) before the red flags came out when Giacomo Ghermandi went off at Turn 1 around halfway through the thirty-minute session.

Just under ten minutes were left on the clock when the session resumed, but nobody was able to improve on their times before the red flags were deployed again around five minutes later when Alejandro Geppert’s Hyundai stopped at Turn 4. This time, the session wouldn’t restart and so it was Young who topped FP2’s times ahead of Files, Oriola, Coronel, Baldan and Filippi with Girolami setting the seventh-fastest time after being quickest in Free Practice 1 this morning.

Back in the paddock, Young sat down with the rest of the Halder Motorsport team and shared out birthday cake, since the Northern Ireland driver celebrated his 21^st birthday last Tuesday.

Jack Young (fastest): “It feels so weird to be twenty-one! We celebrated on Tuesday, but this tops it off nicely; to be second and first in the two Free Practice sessions, so I’m happy. It was a bit of a weird session, there were two red flags and we had one in FP1 as well, so I don’t think anyone has shown their full potential as yet. We definitely have the pace there and so we’ll go forward in the Qualy tomorrow. We plan what we’re going to do at the start of each session, so when there are red flags it restricts what we can do and we have to change things. It makes things a bit stressful but we tried to make the best of it and we got a couple of quick laps in.”

Top positions

1.     Jack Young (Halder Motorsport, Honda Civic Type R)   1:54.756

2.     Josh Files (Target Competition, Hyundai Elantra N)   1:55.434

3.     Pepe Oriola (Aggressive Team Italia, Hyundai Elantra N)  1:55.731

4.     Tom Coronel (Comtoyou Racing, Audi RS 3 LMS TCR)   1:55.903

5.     Nicola Baldan (Target Competition, Hyundai Elantra N)   1:56.234

6.     John Filippi (Sébastien Loeb Racing – Bardahl Team, CUPRA Leon Competición)   1:56.236

The two-stage Qualifying session is scheduled to start at 09.45 CEST tomorrow with Race 1 at 14.05. Race 2 is then at 12.05 on Sunday. Qualifying and both races will be streamed live on the series’ social media pages and on the TCR Portal.

Qualifying live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NgfLeC2UpQ