Misano DTM: Di Resta dominates wet qualifying

Mercedes driver Paul di Resta will start DTM's first night race from pole position as he topped Saturday qualifying at Misano by half a second.

The session was held under wet conditions, the top time constantly falling during the session with Rene Rast taking the early lead with a 1m50.579s - but the pole time eventually ended up over three seconds faster.

It was Rast who spent most of the time in the lead, and he was also first with six minutes on the clock when he went three tenths faster than Lucas Auer.

But he was then demoted by di Resta with a 1m47.382s and Rast's subsequent improvement fell 0.039s short.

Edoardo Mortara came even closer, only 0.002s behind the Scotsman as the chequered flag fell, only for di Resta to go half a second quicker and end up topping the session with a 1m46.854s.

Mortara completed a Mercedes 1-2 as Audi man Rast ended up third.

Gary Paffett was fourth, losing three points of his points lead over Mercedes stablemate di Resta, the gap shrinking to 26 points.

Timo Glock was the top BMW driver in fifth while Auer brought a fourth Mercedes into the top six.

He beat Mike Rockenfeller (Audi) by 0.006s, as the top 10 was completed by Pascal Wehrlein (Mercedes), Augusto Farfus (BMW) and Daniel Juncadella (Mercedes).

BMW's top man in the standings Marco Wittmann was only 15th, while the manufacturer's wildcard Alex Zanardi rounded out the order in 19th.

He was 3.7s slower than di Resta but only nine tenths behind 18th-placed Philipp Eng, who started his session with an off-track excursion at Turn 5.

Qualifying results

Cla	Driver	Car	Laps	Time	Gap
1	Paul di Resta	Mercedes-AMG C63 DTM	11	1'46.826
2	Edoardo Mortara	Mercedes-AMG C63 DTM	10	1'47.295	0.469
3	René Rast	Audi RS5 DTM	11	1'47.401	0.575
4	Gary Paffett	Mercedes-AMG C63 DTM	12	1'47.434	0.608
5	Timo Glock	BMW M4 DTM	9	1'47.569	0.743
6	Lucas Auer	Mercedes-AMG C63 DTM	11	1'47.597	0.771
7	Mike Rockenfeller	Audi RS5 DTM	12	1'47.603	0.777
8	Pascal Wehrlein	Mercedes-AMG C63 DTM	12	1'47.645	0.819
9	Augusto Farfus	BMW M4 DTM	11	1'47.654	0.828
10	Daniel Juncadella	Mercedes-AMG C63 DTM	11	1'47.769	0.943
11	Nico Müller	Audi RS5 DTM	12	1'47.850	1.024
12	Robin Frijns	Audi RS5 DTM	12	1'48.115	1.289
13	Bruno Spengler	BMW M4 DTM	11	1'48.303	1.477
14	Loic Duval	Audi RS5 DTM	11	1'48.505	1.679
15	Marco Wittmann	BMW M4 DTM	10	1'48.550	1.724
16	Joel Eriksson	BMW M4 DTM	11	1'48.674	1.848
17	Jamie Green	Audi RS5 DTM	11	1'49.383	2.557
18	Philipp Eng	BMW M4 DTM	10	1'49.631	2.805
19	Alessandro Zanardi	BMW M4 DTM	10	1'50.571	3.745