Alex Lynn will lead the field around on the formation lap for this weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, after producing a stellar effort during Thursday evening’s two-part Hyperpole shootout to secure the prime spot on the starting grid for Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA. This is how he did it…
Lynn was already fastest in Wednesday qualifying – which whittled the 21 Hypercar category contenders down to 15 for Hyperpole – and team-mate Will Stevens then progressed safely through H1 before handing the #12 Cadillac V-Series.R over to his countryman for the all-important H2 pole position showdown.
In a tense session, the American manufacturer duelled it out for supremacy against rivals Porsche and BMW, with the pair of gold prototypes ultimately ending up at the top of the timesheets in the hands of Lynn and Earl Bamber, separated by a mere 0.167s seconds over the 13.626km lap.
For the former, the result represented redemption after missing out on pole by an even smaller margin 12 months earlier.
“This new format is interesting – and tricky!” Lynn reflected. “You jump in cold and on cold tyres, with only ten or 12 minutes to do an ‘out’ lap and then a ‘push’ run, so it’s really not easy. We also went very aggressive on the diff settings and I wasn’t quite sure of the way to go, so I was frantically adjusting everything on the fly. It was a hard work lap, shall we say!
“To be good in qualifying, you need a lot of front-end and I think we’ve got good front downforce on our car when we hook it up, plus the way we can fire up our tyres. I think sometimes the window can be a bit too small, but when it’s on-song, it’s a brilliant car.
“I’ve waited 12 months to get to do this again, because P2 last year was just one tenth-of-a-second off pole but it felt like 100 miles away. There’s a big difference between P1 and P2 in that feeling, and I was determined to get it this year.
“I think pole at Le Mans is always special, no matter, because this is the race of the year. To prove yourself as the fastest over one lap doesn’t mean anything for the race, but it does mean something in terms of pride.”
The 93rd edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans will get underway at 16:00 CEST today (Saturday, 14 June), with tennis legend Roger Federer acting as official starter.
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