6 Hours of Bahrain: Hartley/Webber/Bernhard again at pole

Porsche 919 Hybrid #17 of Mark Webber, Brendon Hartley and Timo Bernhard again will start from pole at tomorrows 6 Hours of Bahrain, the last round of FIA World Endurance Championship. This is fifth pole position in eight races this season for trio of Porsche drivers who are leading the championship drivers’ classification and record 11th consecutive pole position for Porsche. With one point earned for Bahrain’s pole #17 crew now have 13 points more than second placed crew of #7 Audi (Lotterer, Treluyer/Fassler), so tomorrow will be enough to finished at least fourth and they will take a title.

#17 Porsche secured pole with Bernhard’s and Hartley’s best average lap time 1.39.736, which is 0.364s faster then sister car #18 of Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb. #7 Audi R18 e-tron quattro will start from 3rd place on the grid, sharing second row with sister car #8 of Lucas di Grassi, Loic Duval and Oliver Jarvis. Two Toyotas will start from Row 3, ahead two Rebellion Racing prototypes.

The fastest LMP2 prototype was #36 Signatech’s Alpine A450b (Nissan) of Nelson Panciaticci, Paul Loup Chatin and Tom Dillmann. It is first pole for Signatech Alpine team. They were followed by two teams which  are leading the championship chase – #47 KCMG and #26 G-Drive.

Gianmaria Bruni and Toni Vilander secured pole position for AF Corse #51 Ferrari in GTE Pro class. They claimed the third pole position of the year ahead sister car #71 of of Davide Rigon and James Calado. The extra championship point for pole position extends Ferrari’s lead in the FIA World Endurance Cup for GT Manufacturers to 5 points, with the two Team Manthey Porsche 911s qualifying in 5th and 7th.

The #98 Aston Martin Racing Vantage of Paul Dalla Lana and Pedro Lamy took its fifth pole position of the season in GTE Am class, ahead of the #50 Larbre Competition Corvette of Paolo Ruberti and Gianluca Roda.  LMGTE Am class leaders Alexey Basov and Andrea Bertolini in the #72 SMP Racing Ferrari were third quickest. The Russian team’s only rivals for the title, the #83 AF Corse Ferrari of Emmanuel Collard and Francois Perrodo, finished the session in 4th place.

The qualifying session of GTE cars was delayed when there was a brief failure of the floodlight system, which was caused by a local outage at the Bahrain International Circuit.  As the lights take several minutes to reset, they were back on 20 minutes later and the session was restarted with the full 20 minutes of qualifying on the clock. The final race of the season will start tomorrow at 15.00 (local time).