Toyota takes Shanghai WEC pole

Toyota claimed only its second pole position of this year's World Endurance Championship at Shanghai.

Alex Wurz and Nicolas Lapierre followed up on their pole at the Silverstone season opener by setting a four-lap average of 1m48.013s aboard their Toyota TS030 Hybrid to edge out Audi drivers Marcel Fassler and Benoit Treluyer by just 0.089 second.

The Toyota duo had a couple of tenths in hand before Treluyer went out again at the end of the 20-minute session and improved the Audi R18 e-tron quattro's average to close to within a tenth.

"Last year, this was our most competitive track and this year it looks good as well," Lapierre said. "It's looking better than ever before this season with two competitive cars, but we have to be careful. Benoit did a very good lap at the end."

The second Toyota, shared in qualifying by Stephane Sarrazin and Sebastien Buemi, was third, a further six tenths down on the Audi with a 1m48.694s average. The championship-leading Audi, qualified by Allan McNish and Tom Kristensen, ended up more than a second behind its sister car in fourth place.

G-Drive/Delta-ADR drivers John Martin and Mike Conway dominated LMP2 aboard their ORECA-Nissan 03 to claim class pole by nearly eight tenths ahead of the best of the OAK Racing Morgan-Nissans shared by Olivier Pla and Alex Brundle.

Aston Martin Racing took pole position in both GTE classes. Darren Turner put in two laps in the Aston Martin Vantage GTE he shares with Stefan Mucke to leapfrog over the sister car qualified by Bruno Senna and Richie Stanaway to jump to the top of the times in the Pro division by just 0.019sec.

Christoffer Nygaard and Nicki Thiim won the Am class pole by just 0.015sec from the AF Corse Ferrari 458 Italia shared by Marco Cioci and Matt Griffin.