It’ll take someone special to match what this man is capable of. Right in the second lap of the first Superbike qualifying session, Markus Reiterberger (BCC-alpha-Van Zon-BMW) sent a clear message to the competition, clocking a 1:23 lap time on the asphalt of the Schleizer Dreieck. Only one rider could beat him: Florian Alt (Wilbers-BMW Racing). Five and a half minutes before the end of the session, his brand-mate beat the existing best time with a 1:23.411. But that wasn’t the end of it. Boom, boom, boom—Reiterberger pushed the time down to 1:23.267 on the very last lap. Both the Bavarian and the North Rhine-Westphalian were riding right at the limit. Alt was half a second faster today than yesterday. The fact is: the duel between the two continues.
There were no further improvements at the top in the second qualifying session. As a result, Reiterberger, Alt, and Jan Mohr (BCC-alpha-Van Zon-BMW) will start from the front row in tomorrow’s first IDM Superbike race, while Julian Puffe will line up alongside his GERT56 teammate on the second row. And Bastien Mackels will be the first rider not riding a BMW to take his place there. The Belgian from Team Kawasaki Weber-Motos Racing surpassed himself. After all, this is his first race back since his leg injury in May at Oschersleben.
Leandro Mercado, riding the Holzhauer-Honda, has unexpectedly dropped back to ninth on the grid in the third row, alongside Pepijn Bijsterbosch (BCC-alpha-Van Zon-BMW) and the fastest Yamaha rider, Rob Hartog (Team SWPN). There’s a reason for this. It wasn’t because he was intimidated by the unique nature of this racetrack; rather, after the Superbike World Championship rider had posted decent times in free practice, he had a violent collision with Marc Neumann in the first qualifying session. Neither rider crashed, but Mercado’s Fireblade was completely wrecked. The radiator and fairing were broken, and the brake had been torn off. After seven laps, qualifying was over for the Argentine. In the second session, unlike Finsterbusch, Mackels, and Bijsterbosch, he was unable to improve his time; instead, he slipped to ninth on the grid amid the weather-related ups and downs. Still, he didn’t let it get him down.