Cairoli puts Bronze Huber Porsche on pole for 24h Spa!

Text: Rick Kiewiet

Images: SRO

For the first time in four years, there will be no Mercedes AMG on pole position for the Crowdstrike 24 Hours of Spa: the #20 Huber Porsche, which will compete in the Bronze class, will start the race tomorrow from p1. With a faultless lap of 2:16.880, Matteo Cairoli was 0.116s faster than Alessio Rovera in the #51 AF Corse Ferrari. It is the first time in recent history that a Bronze-class entry takes overall pole for the 24-hour enduro in the Belgian Ardennes.

13 of the 20 Pro-class entries already missed the Superpole-session and will start way down the field, as Thursday's qualifying session was cut short due to heavy rain. This opened the opportunity for several Gold, Silver and Bronze entries to try and get overall pole. Another Bronze class Porsche that has been fast since the start of the sessions at Spa, the #911 Pure Rxcing Porsche of Bachler, Seefried, Sturn and Malykhin will start from p3, an inch ahead of the Pro-cup #6 K-Pax Lambo of Sandy Mitchell, Marco Mapelli and Franck Perera.

The British-GT heavy #5 Optimum McLaren with Sam de Haan, Charles Fagg, Dean MacDonald and Tom Gamble will start the race from as high as p5. First of the Audi R8s on the grid is the #40 Tresor Orange1 entryof Ricardo Feller, Mattia Drudi and Dennis Marschall.

There's not a single Mercedes in the top-15 (!) on the grid for tomorrow's race, the #999 GruppeM car of Maro Engel, Mikael Grenier and Dani Juncadella is the highest classified car of the Stuttgart brand. Still slightly better than its Bavarian counterpart: not a single BMW made it into Superpole: best classified are both WRT entries, the #46 and #32 will start 21st and 22nd respectively.

Race start is tomorrow 4.30 PM local time (3.30 PM UK) and will be streamed live on the GT World youtube channel.