Thed Björk tops both Practice sessions at Eastern Creek

Cyan Racing’s Thed Björk emerged as the fastest driver in the two Free Practice sessions of the Kumho TCR World Tour/TCR Australia joint event at Eastern Creek’s Sydney Motorsport Park. In the first session the Swede was followed by the three Lynk & Co sister cars of his teammates Yann Ehrlacher, Santiago Urrutia and Ma Qing Hua, while in FP2, Urrutia was second ahead of Mikel Azcona and the outgoing TCR Australia champion Tony D’Alberto.

Practice 1 – Azcona set the first mark with a lap of 1:35.5005, but he was soon ousted by the Lynk & Co cars, with Björk clocking 1:35.2179 ahead of Ehrlacher 1:35.2912, Urrutia 1:35.4328 and Ma Qing Hua 1:35.4688, while Tom Oliphant was the fastest TCR Australia competitor, in eighth position with a lap of 1:35.9031.

The session was disrupted by the red flag with twelve minutes to go, when Kody Garland’s Peugeot crashed at T1 suffering terminal damage.

The clock was not stopped and so the session resumed with less than five minutes left and nobody was able to improve.

Practice 2 – HMO Customer Racing teammates Josh Buchan (1:35.8777) and TCR Australia points leader Bailey Sweeny (1:35.9321) were the only drivers who lapped in the 1:35s during the first half of the session, until Will Brown squeezed among them posting 1:35.9073. Brown, then improved to 1:35.7869, moving on top of the timesheet.

The last ten minutes of the session began with a new provisional fastest lap set by Björk in 1:34.7565, while Urrutia moved into second with a lap of 1:35.7182. D’Alberto clocked 1:35.0943 demoting Urrutia to third, but Azcona went faster in 1:34.9501 and slotted into P2. During the final moments, Urrutia retook the second position with a lap of 1:34.8725

Action will continue later at 18:00 local time (08:00 CET) with the Qualifying session that will be streamed live on tcr-series.tv and YouTube.

Picture: TCR Australia/Daniel Kalisz