The FIA World Endurance Championship’s newest race-winner BMW will start at the front of the field for this weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans (13-14 June), after Cadillac lost a second consecutive Hypercar pole position for the season’s showpiece event to a penalty.
Hypercar
When the dust settled at the end of a frenetic Hyperpole 2 shootout around the iconic Circuit de la Sarthe, a scant five thousandths-of-a-second was all that separated Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA’s Jack Aitken from BMW M Team WRT’s Dries Vanthoor. It was the latter, though, that would inherit pole after the Brit was stripped of his best lap time due to having left the working lane to join the fast lane at the beginning of the session before being authorised to do so
For the majority of the 15-minute showdown, the top spot on the starting grid had looked to be heading BMW’s way in any case, as Vanthoor punched in a succession of purple sectors and fastest laps, but on his final flyer, Aitken – in only his second appearance for Anglo-American outfit Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA – surged to the summit of the timing screens by the narrowest of margins.
Post-session, however, the #38 Cadillac V-Series.R tumbled down the classification to 10th due to the penalty, promoting the #15 BMW M Hybrid V8 that Vanthoor shares with Kevin Magnussen and Raffaele Marciello to pole.
“I’m super-happy to give everybody in the team who has worked so hard over the past months and years what they deserve,” the Belgian commented. “That said, we obviously shouldn’t be too happy yet, because our goal is to win the race so we need to keep it clean over the weekend, but it’s a great position to start.”
Cadillac will still have one car on the front row courtesy of Will Stevens in second, with António Félix da Costa backing up a pace-setting Hyperpole 1 performance by team-mate Charles Milesi to put the #35 Alpine Endurance Team A424 third. The second BMW – the Spa-winning #20 entry piloted in Hyperpole 2 by Robin Frijns – rounds out the top four.
Hypercar newcomer Genesis Magma Racing produced a phenomenal effort to line up sixth and ninth in the hands of Paul-Loup Chatin and former world champion André Lotterer, with the best Ferrari – the 2023 Le Mans-winning #51 499P – just eighth and neither Toyota advancing beyond Hyperpole 1, leaving the multiple title-winning Japanese marque a lowly 14th and 15th.
LMGT3
The Heart of Racing Team will start from pole position in the ultra-competitive LMGT3 category. Mattia Drudi in the #27 Aston Martin Vantage claimed his second consecutive LMGT3 pole at Le Mans after reprising his 2025 heroics.
The Italian outpaced the #21 VISTA AF Corse Ferrari driven by Alessio Rovera just under a second.
LMP2
LMP2 saw the #29 Forestier by Panis entry set the best time in the Hyperpole after Esteban Masson set a blistering lap of 3m32.885s, heading the #28 IDEC Sport entry driven by Job van Uitert by 0.387s. But it will be the IDEC entry that will start from the pole itself after the #29 will serve a one place grid drop for a qualifying penalty issued on Wednesday evening.
In the earlier Hyperpole 1 session for LMP2 and LMGT3 cars, the times were topped by Tom Dillman in the #43 Inter Europol Competition Oreca-Gibson and #27 Heart of Racing Aston Martin driven by Zacharie Robichon respectively.
Full report to follow
