Manthey PureRxcing Ready To Race
The #92 Manthey PureRxcing team pulled an all-nighter to rebuild the heavily damaged LMGT3.R around a replacement chassis trucked in from Manthey’s Nurburgring base around 90 minutes away.
The car was completed at around 7am this morning with better news still that the team’s Bronze-rated driver, Alex Malykhin, who was the man involved in the huge Raidillon shunt, was cleared fit to race last night.
Penske’s 100th Sportscar Pole
Porsche’s pole position for today’s 6 Hours of Spa Francorchamps for the #5 Porsche Penske Motorsport 963after the deletion of times for the initially session topping #50 Ferrari is notable for several reasons. It is Penske’s 100th pole position in sportscar racing and is close to, but not quite, the closest pole setting margin in the WEC’s history.
The 8 thousandths of a second gap to the #2 Cadillac, itself a record qualifying position, the #2 car of Alex Lynn’s previous top qualifying performance was third at Bahrain in 2023.
The closest ever qualifying gap was literally unbearable, 2014 at Shanghai saw a dead heat, albeit in an era where qualifying was determined across the average of four flying laps.
The #14 Porsche 919 of Romain Dumas and Neel Jani and the #8 Toyota TS040 of Anthony Davidson and Sebastien Buemi set the exact same time of 1:48.300 after an average of the four best laps for each car.
Dumas and Jani set their time early in the session and decided to park the car in the pitlane as Davidson and Buemi tried to beat their time.
After setting a time just 0.01 seconds behind the Porsche, Buemi’s next lap meant the average of the four laps matched their rivals exactly with just 50 seconds remaining on the clock. Because Dumas and Jani set the time first, they claimed their second pole position of the season.
Major Traffic Issues
There is already a very large crowd at Spa this morning with close to 90,000 tickets having been sold for this race.
The continuing challenge of major roadworks in Francorchamps village though is causing major issues for fans trying to get to the track with multiple approaching racegoers reporting delays on the surrounding roads and autoroutes of over two hours.
Starting Grid
Here’s the starting grid for the race today, the #50 Ferrari starts 19th, at the back of the Hypercar grid, the #95 United Autosports McLaren, also losing its initial grid place (2nd in LMGT3) for being underweight in post session scrutineering.
