Parente earns PWC pole with Long Beach record

Defending race winner Alvaro Parente bested his own track record on the way to his second straight Pirelli World Challenge pole for Sunday's 50-minute race at Long Beach.

Parente, who had never seen the streets of Long Beach until last year, set a lap of 1m18.883 seconds in his K-PAX McLaren 650S with only a few minutes left in the 20-minute qualifying round.

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"It was definitely not full-dry conditions so you couldn't really attack," Parente explained, "especially that braking area into Turn 9. In between turns 9 and 10, it was also wet there so I was quite impressed with the lap time. If it was fully dry, I believe the pack would have gone quite a bit quicker, especially if everything was normal.

"I'm happy to have come back, got that last sector right with three minutes to go, and then concluded my lap. Mentally, I knew that the end would have been better so maybe even waiting another five minutes would have helped but we didn't do that since all of our main competition didn't do it. So, we decided to go too and we didn't have a problem."

Current GT points leader Patrick Long, who leads Parente by two, was second fastest and just .100 behind in second place.

"We went with the strategy of putting a lap in early," said Long. "Where we got caught off gaurd was that all weekend we had a 15-minute practice session but when we got out and the tuggers left, that's when we got the update of a 20-minute session so we ended up running out of fuel at the end. Everybody's doing their best and we learn from it. In the end, no excuses. Alvaro (Parente) is a class act and tomorrow is the race so we'll see."

Parente's K-PAX teammate Bryan Sellers was third fastest at 1m19.088s. The top 12 drivers were all within one second of Parente. 

Daniel Mancinelli, who rammed into the back of Tim Pappas' Mercedes Benz AMG GT3 in the closing minutes of the second, was fourth fastest, followed by the Ferrari 488 GT3-R of Alex Riberas. Manicelli was able to continue but Pappas fell to 21st overall.

In GTA, James Sofronos' fast weekend continued as the FP1 leader laid down a time of 1m20.147s late in the session, followed by Michael Schein (1m20.155s) and Magnus' John Potter (1m20.604s).

"We thought about the weather and scuffed in our tires in practice," Sofronas said. "I think it hurt us in the end but we were hedging that we could put a fast lap early in case someone got a red flag because our tires would come up quicker. Obviously it was a green session and I probably didn't get the best of the tire. In one way, we got a good race pace but we probably didn't get the most of the tires. However, the car is balanced and we'll take the pole. I'm happy to be on pole, but we have a lot of work to do tomorrow."

GT and GTA classes hit the streets for Round 3 competition at 1 p.m. ET. Fans can keep track of timing and scoring in real-time at PWC's TSL link at http://www.tsl-timing.com/event/171406/ under the LIVE TIMING link. CBS Sports Network will air the same-day broadcast at 2:30 p.m. ET as well as an encore presentation at 6:30 p.m. ET (3:30 p.m. PT).