WEC: Vanthoor, BMW Lead Pack Headed To Le Mans Hyperpole
Dries Vanthoor and the #15 Team WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 led the pack in Wednesday evening’s Qualifying Practice at Le Mans!
Vanthoor and the #15 BMW he shares with Raffaele Marciello and Marco Wittmann are among the eight Hypercar teams headed to the battle for pole position tomorrow. They’ll be joined by the two Cadillac Racing V-Series.Rs run by Chip Ganassi Racing, the two Ferrari AF Corse 499Ps, the #35 Alpine Endurance Team A424, and the #6 Porsche Penske Motorsport 963.
“We did a lap in the beginning and then we waited,” explained Vanthoor. “For sure we were actually hoping for a red flag to then have a good position again after the red flag. But it did not come.
“The track improved, we knew that the others improved as well and the car was really good. So yes, I’m really happy, big thank you to the entire team. We know that it’s only a pole position for now, we still have the Hyperpole and we still have a 24-hour race, but everybody is working flat out.”
The #7 Toyota Gazoo Racing GR010 Hybrid should have gone through with them but will not. Kamui Kobayashi was safely through to Hyperpole already, but with three minutes left in Qualifying Practice, he was trying to improve – but clipped too much curb at the exit of the Porsche Curves and spun off into the gravel, bringing out a red flag that ended the session.
Kobayashi was fourth-fastest with a 3:24.754, but had all of his lap times deleted for causing a red flag.
While the #7 Toyota is set to start at the very back of the Hypercar field on Saturday, the #12 Hertz Team JOTA Porsche will go to Hyperpole in its place.
There are no such worries for the rapid #15 BMW which advanced to Hyperpole with a 3:24.465 that Vanthoor set with less than ten minutes to go.
That knocked Le Mans’ own Sebastien Bourdais off the top spot, but he put the #3 Cadillac through with a 3:24.642. Last year’s polesitter Antonio Fuoco also made it through in the #50 Ferrari with a 3:24.731.
The top nine qualifiers in Hypercar surpassed last year’s best time in Qualifying Practice, a 3:25.213 from Fuoco – and positions one through 12 were covered by less than a second!
LMP2
It was the #37 COOL Racing ORECA 07 with Malthe Jakobsen who set the top time in LMP2 – a blistering 3:32.827 – to top the field by three-tenths of a second. Jakobsen set his lap just after the halfway point of the session, eclipsing Louis Deletraz’s 3:33.134 in the AO by TF #14 car.
Ben Hanley then put the #23 United Autosport car in third, ahead of Mathias Beche in the #65 Panis Racing car, and the #28 of IDEC Sport thanks to Job Van Uitert.
LMGT3
Proton Competition took the top spot for Ford in LMGT3, Ben Barker showed his typically rapid form over a single lap early in the session. The British driver’s fourth lap in the blue #77 Ford Mustang LMGT3 delivered a 3:55.263, having traded fastest laps with Frederick Schandorff’s #70 Inception Racing McLaren LMGT3 Evo, ousting the Dane’s 3:55.406 by less than two-tenths.