LE MANS 2019

Toyota reserves provisional 'first line'

The only major difference from yesterday's qualification has to do with the fact that Toyota has provisionally booked the first line of the 24h Le Mans grid. Kamui Kobayashi was again the fastest driver at the wheel of his Toyota TS050 Hybrid # 7, registering a time of 3m15.497s, beating Kazuki Nakajima in the Toyota # 8, by 0.411s, which with this result put his car on the second position..
SMP Racing, which with its BR Engineering BR1 was the second quickest in yesterday's first qualifying session, once again qualified as the closest team to Toyota, with Mikhail Aleshin recording the fastest time of the Russian team, sprinting '3m16.953s, almost second and half slower than the record of the best Toyota.
It is recalled that Rebellion Racing's # 1 car saw its times yesterday being canceled due to an infraction in the fuel flow meter but now had the opportunity to recover to fourth place with the 3m17.317s achieved by Neel Jani .
The other Rebellion R-13, Thomas Laurent's # 3, poured liquid onto the runway along the last part of Mulsanne straight, stopping just after the turn which led to a red flag ordered by Proof's director, Portuguese Eduardo Freitas . The car did not return to the track, and is now only in sixth place, behind the second of the SMP BR1, the # 17 of Stephane Sarrazin.
At LMP2, Pastor Maldonado kept DragonSpeed ​​at the top, now being three tenths ahead of Stephane Richelmi's Jackie Chan DC Racing Oreca # 38. Signatech Alpine's Oreca # 36 has not improved its time, but yesterday's record for Nicolas Lapierre is enough to stay in third place ahead of TDS Racing Oreca and Racing Team Nederland Dallara.
As for Filipe Albuquerque, the # 22 of United Autosports, also did not improve his registration and so fell to sixth.
In the GTE Pro, there were also significant changes, as Porsche regained provisional pole, after Michael Christensen in the Porsche 911 RSR # 92, achieved a record of 3m49.388s near the end of the session. As soon as the ACO makes the times available, we will update the positions of the remaining Portuguese pilots. José Luis Abreu, de Portugal