BMW took pole position for the Le Mans 24 Hours on Thursday after Cadillac seized the top slot, but then dropped to 10th due to a pitlane infringement.<\/p>\n
Cadillac had hoped for a second successive pole in the main event of the world endurance calendar, but while Jack Aitken was fastest in the number 38 car it was the number 15 BMW, with Belgian Dries Vanthoor at the wheel, that came out on top.<\/p>\n
Vanthoor shares his car with Danish former F1 driver Kevin Magnussen and Swiss-born Italian Raffaele Marciello.<\/p>\n
Briton Aitken was penalised, by having his fastest lap deleted, for joining the pitlane fast lane a minute before cars were allowed to ahead of the final session.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe gained nothing, so that makes it all the more difficult to accept,\u201d Aitken said of the penalty.<\/p>\n
The number 23 Cadillac will line up second on the grid at the Circuit de la Sarthe in western France with the number 35 Alpine qualifying third for the 94th edition of the race that starts on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The pole was BMW\u2019s first of the Hypercar era at Le Mans.<\/p>\n
The number 20 BMW shared by Robin Frijns, Ren\u00e9 Rast and South Africa\u2019s Sheldon van der Linde qualified fourth.<\/p>\n
Defending champions Ferrari qualified their factory AF Corse cars eighth and 12th. The separate, yellow-liveried AF Corse number 83 of last year\u2019s winners Phil Hanson, Yifei Ye and Robert Kubica qualified 17th.<\/p>\n
The race starts at 4pm on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BMW took pole position for the Le Mans 24 Hours on Thursday after Cadillac seized the top slot,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20955],"tags":[32260,6213,26709,31983,32256,7661,32259,32257,32258,32253,32254,32255,20612,32261],"class_list":["post-35157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bmw","tag-af-corse","tag-bmw","tag-cadillac","tag-circuit-de-la-sarthe","tag-dries-vanthoor","tag-ferrari","tag-hypercar","tag-jack-aitken","tag-kevin-magnussen","tag-le-mans-24-hours","tag-le-mans-24-hours-pole-position","tag-pitlane-infringement","tag-robert-kubica","tag-yifei-ye"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}