When Giovinazzi displaced Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA’s Jack Aitken to vault to the head of the order behind the wheel of the #51 car he shares with fellow defending world champions James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi, the job looked to be done – but Aitken was not yet finished.
Digging deep, the Briton matched his Italian rival’s pace-setting effort to the thousandth of a second, but with Giovinazzi having posted the time first, it is the Ferrari that will line up on pole, with Aitken’s #38 Cadillac V-Series.R alongside, setting the scene for a sensational scrap for supremacy.
Underscoring the fiercely close nature of the ten-minute shootout, Charles Milesi snatched third in the #35 Alpine Endurance Team A424, a mere 0.029s adrift of the benchmark time, with Harry Tincknell next up in Aston Martin THOR Team’s #007 Valkyrie.
The five hundredths of a second that separated the top four Hypercars – all fielded by different manufacturers – represents the closest gap in the championship’s 106 events to date, eclipsing the previous record set at Imola in April.
In LMGT3, meanwhile, Aston Martin outfit Heart of Racing Team locked out the front row of the grid, as Eduardo Barrichello secured the British marque’s third consecutive pole position in the championship and his third pole from four Hyperpole appearances in FIA WEC, an unrivalled achievement in the fiercely contested production-based category.
Lone Star Le Mans will get underway at 13:00 local time (GMT-5) on Sunday, 6 September.
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