Forty Cars, Standing Water, and Ten Minutes of Chaos
Qualifying sessions rarely tell a story this cleanly. Pouring rain soaked the circuit right up until ten minutes before the green light dropped, leaving 40 Gallardo Super Trofeo cars to navigate a surface that was more river than racetrack. Every team bolted on rain tires. Nobody gambled on slicks. In conditions where visibility through the spray behind a V10-powered Gallardo is essentially zero, the smart move and the brave move looked identical: get out, find a rhythm, and hope the car stays underneath you.
The Japanese duo of Hironori Takeguchi and Masami Kageiama from Top Speed Racing found that rhythm first, posting the quickest early times while the rest of the field was still sorting out braking points on a surface with the grip characteristics of a freshly waxed kitchen floor. For a few laps, they owned provisional pole.
Then the weather did what weather does at the worst possible moment: it changed. Halfway through the session, the track began drying rapidly, the kind of drying where rain tires go from essential to destructive in two or three laps, overheating on the increasingly exposed dry line and actually losing grip compared to a slick compound. Every team faced the same calculation at once: pit now, lose track position, and hope the slicks come up to temperature before the clock runs out, or stay out on degrading wets and watch lap times balloon. What followed turned this from a routine qualifying hour into the session that defined the entire World Final weekend.
The Tire Gamble That Reshuffled the Entire Grid
All 40 cars pitted. The entire field, simultaneously. In qualifying, where clean air matters enormously, this turned the pit lane into controlled pandemonium. Mechanics scrambled to swap rubber while drivers sat strapped in, watching rivals roll out ahead of them.
Max Wiser, a PRO-AM competitor from the Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo Asia series, was the first car back on circuit with slick tires. The reward for that speed in the pit box was immediate and dramatic: Wiser’s first flying lap on slicks came in two seconds faster than the previous benchmark set by Top Speed Racing on wets. Two full seconds. In a one-make series where cars are mechanically identical, a swing that large tells you everything about how violently the conditions had shifted and how much time remained on the table for anyone still circulating on rain rubber.
The Gallardo Super Trofeo’s all-wheel-drive system proved its worth in both phases. In the wet, it provided the traction confidence that let drivers push through standing water. On the drying surface with fresh slicks, it helped get heat into all four tires faster than a rear-drive platform would, rewarding the teams that executed their pit stops cleanly.
Within minutes, the order reshuffled completely. Kevin Conway and Lawson Aschenbach, the Change Racing PRO-AM Super Trofeo North America winners, grabbed provisional pole. The Japanese pair who had dominated the wet phase vanished from the top of the timing screens. But in a session where conditions improved lap by lap, no position was safe for long.
Last-Lap Heroics and a Champion’s Pole Steal
Conway and Aschenbach’s grip on pole lasted about as long as the rain had. Milos Pavlovic and Mirko Bortolotti, Super Trofeo Europe protagonists racing for Bonaldi Motorsport, surpassed the Americans with a quicker lap as the track continued to rubber in and offer more grip with every passing minute. The advantage belonged to whoever could extract the most from the final moments, and the final moments delivered.
As the session clock expired, a flurry of personal bests landed simultaneously. The Change Racing duo improved again. Bortolotti improved again. The PRO-AM pair of Yasuyuki Uchida and Tomonogu Fujii from Top Speed China posted their best times. Then, when the grid looked settled, Alberto Viberti, the 2013 AM World Champion, put in a scorching final sector and stole pole position outright.
Viberti’s lap is the kind of moment that defines one-make racing. Same car, same tires, same rapidly evolving conditions. The difference was the driver. For a proven champion already carrying an AM title, the composure to find time on the very last lap of a session this chaotic speaks to exactly the racecraft that separates weekend warriors from genuine competitors. It also crystallized the session’s central drama: in qualifying where the track changed minute by minute, the driver who adapted fastest won, not the driver who was fastest at any single point.
Jake Rattenbury of Automobili Lamborghini Racing Team UK also delivered a strong qualifying performance, securing AM Class pole and finishing sixth overall. For a gentleman driver category, sixth on the combined grid against PRO-AM runners is a result worth noting.
A white and blue Lamborghini Gallardo race car with sponsor decals speeds along a wet racetrack under an overcast sky.
What the Grid Means for Tomorrow’s World Final
The World Final brings together champions and frontrunners from all three continental Super Trofeo series, Europe, Asia, and North America, for a single weekend that determines the global champion. Starting position matters enormously in a one-make field where overtaking requires either a mistake from the car ahead or a significantly better tire strategy during the race itself.
Viberti’s pole gives him clean air and the psychological advantage of leading into turn one. But qualifying also revealed something important about the competitive spread: the final lap reshuffled positions so dramatically that the drivers starting behind him know they had the pace. Conway and Aschenbach, Bortolotti, and the Top Speed China pairing all improved on the final lap. The gaps will be small. The races, scheduled for live streaming on the Lamborghini Squadra Corse website, should reflect that.
The mix of driver categories on the grid adds a layer of complexity that pure spec-racing series sometimes lack. PRO-AM teams running professional and amateur driver pairings share the track with AM class entries, and the combined grid means gentleman drivers find themselves racing wheel-to-wheel with seasoned professionals. The result is a race that rewards consistency and clean driving as much as raw pace, a dynamic this qualifying session previewed perfectly when Rattenbury’s AM class car slotted into sixth overall.
Super Trofeo as a Proving Ground
The Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo, established in 2009 with the Gallardo LP560-4, was built on a simple premise: give customer teams identical cars and let the drivers sort it out. The partnership with Blancpain gave the series a luxury positioning that separated it from the more utilitarian customer racing programs offered by some competitors. Qualifying sessions like this one, where conditions strip away any equipment advantage and expose pure driver ability, are the best advertisement for that philosophy.
The Gallardo Super Trofeo eventually gave way to the Huracán Super Trofeo, which itself evolved through EVO and EVO2 iterations. Each generation refined the aerodynamics, the electronics, and the structural rigidity of the platform while keeping the core idea intact: one car, many drivers, let talent decide. The Temerario GT3, Lamborghini’s first competition car fully designed, developed, and built in-house by Squadra Corse, represents the next chapter in a motorsport strategy that the Super Trofeo series helped establish.
For prospective customer racers watching this World Final, the practical takeaway is straightforward. The Super Trofeo series functions as both a competitive championship in its own right and a development pipeline. Drivers who prove themselves in Super Trofeo competition gain the experience, the team relationships, and the Squadra Corse connections that can open doors to GT3 programs. Viberti’s pole lap is a highlight reel moment, but it also represents the kind of racecraft that gets noticed when Lamborghini evaluates driver talent for its broader motorsport ambitions. Sessions like this qualifying hour, where the entire grid pits simultaneously and pole position changes hands on the final lap, are the reason the series continues to attract both serious amateur racers and professional talent looking for seat time.
