Garage 59’s #59 McLaren topped the timesheets in Thursday’s Spa 24 Hours night qualifying, which locked in positions 21 to 75 on the grid for the weekend’s race and determined the 20 cars to contest Friday evening’s Superpole session, which decides how the sharp end will line up.
The #59’s three drivers, Joseph Loake, Benji Goethe and Marvin Kirchhofer, posted a combined average of 2:16.454 across their respective sessions, putting them 0.505 seconds ahead of the second-place #31 WRT BMW, driven by Dries Vanthoor, Sheldon van der Linde and Marco Wittman. The #22 Schumacher CLRT Porsche (Guven/Heinrich/Bachler) made it three different brands in the top three, with a pair of Mercedes filling out positions four and five, in the shape of the #17 GetSpeed and #48 MANN-FILTER entries.
The #163 VSR Lamborghini headed the two Pro-class AF Corse Ferraris in sixth, seventh and eighth respectively, with the defending race winners in the #7 Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin and the #998 ROWE BMW rounding out the top 10. Two Gold Cup entries have claimed a place in the Superpole runoff: the #33 Verstappen.com Aston Martin of Vermeulem/Lulham/King in 14th, and the #92 Herberth Motorsport Porsche of Ineichen/Heineman/Sturm in 19th. The Valentino Rossi/Kevin Magnussen/Rene Rast BMW snatched the final Superpole position in 20th.
Silver Cup pole position and a confirmed 21st place overall on Saturday’s starting grid went to the Century Motorsport #42 BMW entry of Waberski, Moore and Jansen, while last year’s Bronze Cup race-winning crew of Mukovoz, Hofer, Nezov and Pereira put themselves in the best possible position to repeat their result in the #66 Tresor Attempto Racing Audi. AV Racing by Car Collection topped the Pro-Am qualifiers, slotting in 61st overall with the #29 entry.
A number of cars had incidents across the four sub-sessions of Night Qualifying, with Nicolas Baert in the #21 Comtoyou Aston Martin finding the tyres at Campus corner shortly after the start of Q1 during a momentary rain shower. After running had resumed, but before many had time to set a meaningful lap, Louis Machiels had a minor spin on the way into Les Combes, bringing out the reds again. Seven minutes remained when running resumed, with the rain now having stopped.
A final red brought things to a premature conclusion as Tim Sandtler went off in a big way at Raidillon, burying the #611 Nordique Mercedes’ nose in the tyre barrier but emerging uninjured. Later on, during Q3, there was more woe for Comtoyou as Sebastien Alvarez went off in the #11 Aston, albeit causing less damage than Baert’s earlier incident.
The multiple delays put the timetable significantly behind schedule, however night practice went ahead as planned, kicking off at 23:59 local time and running for the originally scheduled 90 minutes.
