DNN1

"Hello, everyone, and welcome to DNN Sport 1 for live coverage of qualifying from the Winter Palace for the Imperial League season finale. I'm Sam Tinbru, with me is former IL team principal Bob Anmo, and over the next few hours we'll be bringing you all the action from this absolutely critical moment in the championship. Bob, we're in for an exciting afternoon."

"We are, qualifying is always close here and really it's anybody's game."

"Yes, it's incredibly hard to call, even after having watched a day and a half of practice sessions. What makes this course so competitive, so magical?"

"Well, the magic is in the history here, this is where the sport of dragon racing was born, really, hundreds of years ago, and so there's been a lot of time to get the course here just right. As for competitive, well, it's such a technical layout, there's nowhere around here that doesn't test every dragon and rider to the limit."

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"Indeed. The old saying is that here, the twisty bits are all fast and the fast bits are all twisty. Apart from the stadium, there's almost nowhere that the dragons fly in a straight line here. There are some pretty dramatic altitude changes, down round the end of the lake and again through the ravine under the bridge to the old palace gate."

"Lots of places where there's fast aerobatics into a slow, tight corner, too. That bunches the pack up in the race, makes for amazing racing action, like we saw last year."

"It really did come down to the last few laps last year, and then we only had two championship contenders. This year we have four."

"Which only makes qualifying all the more important, it doesn't matter how good any of our contenders are, having any one of them starting ahead of you would be a challenge. All three would be almost impossible to beat."