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Porsche North America, Porsche 911 RSR

Qualifying

Porsche North America, Porsche 911 RSR
, Tudor United SportsCar Championship, round 6 at Bowmanville/Canada, Qualifying
Bowmanville: Second pole position of the season for Porsche 911 RSR

Two weeks after the double victory at Watkins Glen, Porsche has again secured a good starting position for Sunday’s race in the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. In the qualifying session for round six of the United SportsCar Championship on the former Mosport International Raceway close to Toronto, Porsche works driver Nick Tandy (Great Britain) claimed the GTLM-class pole position in the Porsche 911 RSR with the starting number 911. The Le Mans winner, who shares the cockpit of the 911 RSR fielded by Porsche North America with Patrick Pilet (France), is the first GT driver since the championship was inaugurated in 2014 to take up a race for the second time from pole position. The last time he turned the fastest qualifying lap in the GT field was in October 2014 at Road Atlanta. For Porsche, this marks the second pole position of the season after Sebring.

In the fiercely-contested qualifying, the first five cars were separated by less than half a second. Jörg Bergmeister (Germany) and Le Mans winner Earl Bamber (New Zealand) occupied the sixth grid spot in the sister 911 RSR of Porsche North America. Wolf Henzler (Germany) and Bryan Sellers (USA), who drove to victory at Watkins Glen for the Falken Tire customer team, take up Sunday’s race from the fourth row of the GT grid on the eighth spot.

Quotes after the qualifying
Marco Ujhasi, Overall Project Leader GT Works Motorsport: “To clinch pole at Mosport is an unbelievable experience. It’s an incredibly difficult track and because overtaking is very difficult, it’s vitally important to start right at the front. Our tests over the week have paid off. We were able to implement everything today that we had worked on earlier in the week. Nick drove a sensational lap. Preparations for a race couldn’t have gone better.”
Nick Tandy (Porsche 911 RSR #911): “It’s great to stand at the very front of the grid again. We waited a bit so that our opponents could go out first and leave some rubber on the track. This strategy worked. At the end we were ahead by a tiny margin, just two-hundredths of a second. The Mosport race is the shortest of the season and the circuit doesn’t offer many chances to overtake. With this in mind, it’s definitely the most important pole position of the year.”

The race on Sunday starts at 12.05 hrs local time (18.05 hrs CEST) and runs over 2:40 hours. The race can be seen on the Internet at www.imsa.com.


Qualifying result
GTLM class
1. Pilet/Tandy (F/GB), Porsche 911 RSR, 1:14.829 minutes
2. Auberlen/Werner (USA/D), BMW Z4 GTE, + 0.028 seconds
3. Edwards/Luhr (USA/D), BMW Z4 GTE, + 0.127
4. Kaffer/Fisichella (D/I), Ferrari F458 Italia, + 0.314
5. Magnussen/Garcia (DK/E), Chevrolet Corvette, + 0.496
6. Bamber/Bergmeister (NZ/D), Porsche 911 RSR, + 0.557
8. Henzler/Sellers (D/USA), Porsche 911 RSR, + 0.715



All reports on the previous season can be found in our archive.