Romain Dumas gave Glickenhaus Racing its second FIA World Endurance Championship pole position of 2022, putting in a time of 1m35.416s in the No. 708 SCG007at Monza to lead the field for tomorrow’s 6 Hours of Monza.
That lap was good enough to leave the faster of the two Toyotas on second spot, a full nine-tenths down with Brendon Hartley in the No. 8 Toyota Gazoo Racing GR010 Hybrid. The No. 36 Alpine of Nicolas Lapierre will start third, with the second Toyota alongside on row two.
The debuting Peugeot 9X8s had mixed fortunes, with the No. 94 car fifth on the grid in the hands of Californian Gustavo Menezes but the sister No. 93 struggling to restart after a mid-session pit stop, then stopping on track to bring out a red flag in the final two minutes, so that Mikkel Jensen failed to set a time.
LMP2 saw a fine last lap from Filipe Albuquerque to snatch pole position for the No.22 United Autosports team. His late session 1m38.403s was 0.3s clear of the mid-session effort of Mathias Beche in the No. 44 ARC Bratislava car, second in class by far the best qualifying result so far from the Slovakian squad.
The No. 41 Realteam by WRT car of Ferdinand Habsburg and the No. 83 AF Corse ORECA will complete the second row in LMP2, with the Italian team feeling that they had a shot at a significant improvement, as Alessio Rovera was close to completing a much improved lap when the red flag intervened.
In a season that has seen the AF Corse GTE PRO Ferraris outpaced in qualifying elsewhere, the red cars found their feet on home ground with Alessandro Pier Guidi and Antonio Fuoco holding the top two into the final seconds of the session. The No. 51 Ferrari 488 GTE Evo2 topped the times with a 1m45.270s, the sister car just 0.0058s back.
That was until Nick Tandy finally banged in two flying laps in the No. 64 Chevrolet Corvette C8.R after losing times to track limits earlier in the session. His effort was good enough to split the Ferraris, just 0.004s better than Fuoco’s best.
First pole for the Iron Dames Ferrari 488 GTE Evo LM GTE Am of Rahel Frey, Michelle Gatting and Sarah Bovy. JEP/Motorsport Images
GTE AM produced a late-session battle. The No. 33 TF Sport Aston Martin of Ben Keating had held provisional pole for almost the whole session but was bettered right at the end by an excellent lap from Sarah Bovy in the No. 85 Iron Dames Ferrari, earning the all-female squad’s first class pole this season. Bovy’s 1m47.431s was a quarter of a second up on the best lap from the Texan.
UP NEXT: The 6 Hours of Monza gets underway on Sunday at midday local, 6am ET.
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