Le Mans 24 Hours 2014 Thursday: final qualifying

"It was a pleasant surprise to see my name at the top," provisional pole-winner Brendan Hartley told GARY WATKINS.

Could we really see Porsche lead the field the way on Saturday? It's certainly going to try. Asked if the intention is to go flat-out for pole tonight, Porsche LMP1 vice president Fritz Enzinger said: "Absolutely."

Read the full story here.

Oliver Turvey was not expecting to be racing at Le Mans after the
ADR-Delta-run Millenium ORECA pulled out. But thanks to Marc Gene being called up by Audi to replace Loic Duval in the #1 car, he has given a late call-up to take the Spaniard's place in the JOTA Sport Zytek. Fortunately, he knows the team well.

Turvey, who flew to Le Mans this morning, said: "I'm really excited to be joining JOTA for Le Mans. Obviously, it's terrible to see a big accident and I hope Loic Duval is okay.

"It's going to be a little tricky going straight into Le Mans qualifying at this late stage, however I know JOTA and the Zytek car from last year, it’s a great team with knowledgeable people so I hope to do the best job I can for the team.

"I've not sat in the Zytek since the last race at Paul Ricard nine months ago but I set pole position in four of the five ELMS races last year, winning on my debut and finishing third twice along with Simon [Dolan], so it's a good package."

Alex Wurz knows how to win Le Mans, having done so in the Joest Porsche in 1996 and the Peugeot in 2009. He’s not particularly interested in gunning for pole position.

“As always, I'm urging my car crew, my team and engineer to focus on the race distance because that’s where we get the points," said Wurz. "At Peugeot, we split with one car going for glory but I was glad I didn't have to because it always worked out better for the car that did not to have the slightly better race set-up."

One of the talks of the GTE Pro paddock is the new CR.7, which has been earmarked by rivals Porsche and Aston Martin as one to watch.

That's a big improvement on its predecessor, which toiled here last year and was some away off challenging for the win.

Corvette Racing team manager Gary Pratt told AUTOSPORT that the progress had been good, but qualifying was not their main priority.

"Speed-wise and handling I think we’re on line with where we wanted to be [with the new car]. We had the chance to win at Daytona and Sebring but had problems.

"We probably didn’t do enough track testing but the car will be good at the start and to the end. The team that doesn’t make the mistakes is going to win. Top five we’ll be happy in qualifying because we can race almost as well as we qualify and others don't seem to be able too."

Just past half hour in this session and not to tempt fate but...it's been quite well-behaved so far.

We've had a couple of yellows, sure, but nothing like the pretty chaotic effort of yesterday.

AUTOSPORT got a lot of answers this morning like "it was frustrating" and "it was not ideal", but Bruno Senna's was the best.

“I had a s*** session," said the Brazilian, who went on to say that he was hoping race organisers would be sensible should more incidents occur while teams attempted to make up for lost time today.

"If there are incidents, I hope the ACO understands the problem [with track time],” he added.