Lammers optimistic for race

The black and white machine has looked fast this year, and the qualifying time of 3m36.1s is a truly representative one, even if the Audis weren't trying all that hard.

"I was very happy with our qualifying run," said Lammers. "It's always special to get a clear lap round here. I only lost about half a second behind a Pagani on my run, so I was very close to full potential.

"Andy (Wallace) did a lot of setup work after my qualifying lap yesterday (Thursday), so I think we could actually have done a low 3m35s if we'd done a qualifying run at the very end. But of course it's now time to think about the race."

With the Audi R8 largely untouched since last year, there's every chance the improved Dome could get amongst the German cars. If Bentley fails, that could even mean a fairytale result.

"We're going to be stronger than last year [when he qualified fifth]," he said. "We've learnt from some of the reliability problems we had then and our new gearbox has run almost 7000km without a problem. Andy and I are very experienced, and we've won Le Mans together before. John (Bosch) is proving to be very reliable and I think he will have the pace that we need to run. But the Audi teams have got a great bunch of drivers and it won't be easy."

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Lammers optimistic for race

Jan Lammers is confident that his Racing for Holland Dome-Judd will continue to be strong in the race after it qualified an excellent fourth on the grid, ahead of two of the customer Audi R8s