Jules Gounon’s fastest time of the session swept the #107 Bentley Team M-Sport Continental GT3 to the manufacturer’s first Blancpain GT Series pole at the third round of the Endurance Cup at Paul Ricard.

PRE-QUALIFYING REPORT | RACE REPORT

With the grid decided by the average of times from all three sessions, it was Dinamic Motorsport — winners at Monza — who led on the averages after the first two runs, but Gounon’s 1m52.671 in the #107 Bentley Continental GT3 snatched the top spot away from the Porsche team — which will start in seventh.

The #107, which Gounon shares with Steven Kane and Jordan Pepper, will share the front-row with the #4 Black Falcon Mercedes-AMG GT3 of Yelmer Buurman, Luca Stolz and Maro Engel. The trio finished half-a-tenth behind the Bentley crew despite failing to break into the 1m52s.

Securing third — and Silver Cup pole — was the #55 Attempto Racing Audi R8 LMS of Mattia Drudi and Steijn & Pieter Schothorst with the crew clocking an average time just 0.133s off overall pole. Setting the exact same time as the Attempto team was yesterday’s Pre-Qualifying pace-setter Orange1 FFF Racing. The #563 of team boss Andrea Caldarelli, Marco Mapelli and Dennis Lind also logged a 1m53.471 to qualify in fourth.

Fifth, and fastest of the Porsche 911 GT3 Rs, was the works-supported #99 ROWE Racing entry with Dirk Werner, Matt Campbell and Dennis Olsen finishing just 0.004s behind the third and fourth-placed cars ahead of them.

Highlighting how small the margins have been in qualifying around the French circuit, R Motorsport will start sixth with its Aston Martin Vantage GT3 — only 0.002s behind the German team.

Aston Martin entries claimed pole for both the Pro-Am and Am classes as Oman Racing with TF Sport took its third pole in as many races in Pro-Am — Charlie Eastwood, Ahmad Al-Harthy and Salih Yoluc piloting that Vantage — while Garage 59 stormed to pole in the Am Cup as TopGear presenter Chris Harris, Chris Goodwin and Alexander West finished almost three-tenths ahead of their nearest competition in the class.

The six-hour race gets underway at 18:00 CET (17:00 UK) and you can watch the whole race live on GT REPORT.

 
 

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