Audi take pole in historic qualifying

On its qualifying debut, Audi's diesel-powered R10 TDI has claimed the front row for the Sebring event in Thursday's qualifying, with Allan McNish setting the fastest lap and taking pole position for the No. 2 entry. McNish shares the drive witn Rinaldo Capello and seven-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen.

The No. 1 Audi entry, shared by Marco Werner, ALMS champions Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela, was 1.845 slower.

"Today, Audi has showed America the potential of diesel power," an enthusiastic McNish said after the session.

"This is a historic day for Audi and sports car racing. The engineers at Audi have really developed this engine and car over the last few months and they can be proud of what they achieved.

"The car as is perfectly balanced as a driver could ever want. That had to be the best lap in an Audi in my entire career."

No less remarkable was the performance of Penske Racing's two Porsche RS Spyder, who qualified third and fourth overall, with Lucas Luhr putting the No. 6 entry on LMP2 pole with a new lap record of 1:47.800 - less than two seconds behind McNish's LMP1 pole.

Luhr is joined by Sascha Maassen, with whom he won at Lagnua Seca last season, and the two are joined for Sebring by Emmanuel Collard.

"The car performed very well," Luhr said. "I think we all expected it to. The RS Spyder still has major potential as a reliable race car. I just hope we did everything we could have to be successful to win."

In the GT1, Pedro Lamy took his first pole for Aston Martin Racing, ahead of the second Aston DBR9 of Tomas Enge.

Aston Martin won in the GT1 class at Sebring last year in their ALMS debut, and will start this weekend's race ahead of archrivals Corvette Racing. This is the first time the team are running on Pirelli tyres, too.

"Of course it's nice to be on the pole," Lamy said. "I don't know what our competitors did in qualifying because they were faster yesterday.

"Maybe they had traffic problems. We are just trying to compete. The Corvettes are winning everything over here. We want to fight against them."

Team Panoz took pole position on their ALMS debut in the GT2 class, with David Brabham behind the wheel of the No. 50 Panoz Esperante.

This weekend's race is the first for Brabham at Team Panoz, and he will share his drive with Scott Maxwell and reigning Champ Car champion Sebastien Bourdais.

"It's a new challenge and new season, so it's good to get off to a good start with a good team," said Brabham. "We've worked awhile on qualifying setup. The team obviously has done a good job. Now we're working on a race setup."

Qualifying results: