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Ricciardo on pole at Magny-Cours

Tech 1 Racing's Daniel Ricciardo claimed his fourth Formula Renault 3.5 pole position of the season at Magny-Cours this morning. The British Formula 3 champion edged out Nathanael Berthon by 0.160 seconds

Race one winner Mikhail Aleshin will start third. The Carlin man was perhaps still thinking about his laps yesterday in Renault's R29 Formula 1 car when he spun on the exit of the final chicane commencing a quick lap.

Czech Filip Salaquarda outqualified his highly-rated ISR team-mate Esteban Guerrieri for the third time in four races, and will join Aleshin on the second row of this afternoon's grid.

Ricciardo's pole ends a disappointing recent run, in which he has dropped behind Guerrieri into third place in the drivers' standings.

"Since Monaco things haven't been going that well," said Ricciardo, "so it's good to be back on pole. Traffic is the easiest excuse, but we did have a problem yesterday. At the end of that session we had a clutch problem as well, so the problems were building up. I was really struggling for pace yesterday, and I only finished sixth in the race through luck and people going off ahead.

"If it rains today I hope we can find something else. I have a feeling our problems were tyre related. We just didn't get them working. Perhaps with it being a smooth surface we didn't scrub them in correctly, but they weren't behaving how wet tyres should.

"Today, everything went quite to plan. I went out on fresh tyres just to get a feel of the balance, and then with about 13 minutes to go I put on new tyres. We'll see how the race goes, if it is dry I am confident, but in the wet it was like driving on a set of ice cubes."

Guerrieri will start fifth, and has the potential to renew his rivalry with Stefano Coletti from race one as the Monegasque will start directly behind. Coletti had held provisional pole with five minutes left on the clock until being bumped down the order in quick succession by Ricciardo, Berthon and Guerrieri.

Walter Grubmuller caused the session to be abandoned with less than a minute remaining when his P1 Motorsport machine ground to a halt.

One of the stars of Saturday's race, Jon Lancaster suffered a repeat of the ECU problem that forced him to start from the pitlane in race one and will line-up 14th.

Pos  Driver             Team             Time       Gap
 1.  Daniel Ricciardo   Tech 1           1m26.390s
 2.  Nathnael Berthon   Draco            1m26.550s  + 0.160s
 3.  Mikhail Aleshin    Carlin           1m26.617s  + 0.227s
 4.  Filip Salaquarda   ISR              1m26.634s  + 0.244s
 5.  Esteban Guerrieri  ISR              1m26.668s  + 0.278s
 6.  Stefano Coletti    Comtec           1m26.697s  + 0.307s
 7.  Albert Costa       Epsilon Euskadi  1m26.712s  + 0.322s
 8.  Nelson Panciatici  Junior Lotus     1m26.967s  + 0.577s
 9.  Sten Pentus        Fortec           1m27.281s  + 0.891s
10.  Victor Garcia      KMP              1m27.328s  + 0.938s
11.  Daniil Move        Junior Lotus     1m27.342s  + 0.952s
12.  Daniel Zampieri    Pons             1m27.394s  + 1.004s
13.  Brendon Hartley    Tech 1           1m27.440s  + 1.050s
14.  Jon Lancaster      Fortec           1m27.482s  + 1.092s
15.  Jake Rosenzweig    Carlin           1m27.500s  + 1.110s
16.  Jan Charouz        P1               1m27.508s  + 1.118s
17.  Julian Leal        Draco            1m27.597s  + 1.207s
18.  Anton Nebylitskiy  KMP              1m27.633s  + 1.243s
19.  Keisuke Kunimoto   Epsilon Euskadi  1m27.986s  + 1.596s
20.  Walter Grubmuller  P1               1m28.215s  + 1.825s
21.  Sergio Canamasas   FHV Interwetten  1m28.312s  + 1.922s
22.  Greg Mansell       Comtec           1m28.647s  + 2.257s
23.  Bruno Mendez       FHV Interwetten  1m29.630s  + 3.240s
24.  Federico Leo       Pons             1m41.111s  + 14.721s

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