Yoong: teams will qualify tonight

Qualifying for the 74th running of the Le Mans 24 Hours begins at 7pm local time tonight, with two, two-hour sessions - one in daylight and one after sunset.

The format is then repeated tomorrow, with each team's fastest single lap over the two days being used to determine their grid position for Saturday's race.

Weather predictions for the next two days vary, with some forecasters predicting the circuit will stay dry tonight and be wet tomorrow, and viceversa.

Yoong, making his first Le Mans 24 Hours start this year, believes that although weather conditions are currently humid and overcast at the La Sarthe circuit, his rivals will make an effort to qualify tonight.

"Tomorrow the weather conditions will be worse and a lot of people will go for it tonight," the former Minardi driver told autosport.com. "I've heard it's raining all tomorrow and we're taking it as it comes.

"We will try and do some qualifying laps tonight. My teammate Jan [Lammers] is going to qualify for us and wants to try and do a run in the first [two-hour] session.

"But we want to run through our programme with the tyres first. We want to try and do a long stint and obviously Stefan [Johansson] and I have got to do a couple of laps as well. If we haven't worked through our programme then we will do it in the second session."

The Malaysian is predicting a strong run for his Number 14 Dome-Judd LMP1 team in the race, despite encountering teething problems during last week's official test day.

The team missed the last Le Mans series round at Spa due to installation problems with their Mugen-Honda engine, and have chosen to switch to a Judd V8 for this weekend's prestigious race.

"We're just looking for a trouble-free night," he added. "Obviously this is the first time we have had the Judd engine so in the test day we had a few electrical problems.

"They were nothing major, just some teething problems. The Judd engine is great and and Jan has used it before and we were running out of time. It was no fault of Mugen it was just that due to a lack of resources we couldn't do the testing.

"Jan made the decision to stick with the Judd and used his experience because we know we won't have a vibration problem with the Judd. This engine ran really well last year.

"It is all sorted now. The package is fairly competitive and really we just want to get qualifying out with as few problems as possible, which should put us in good shape for the race."

Yoong believes his team is capable of surprising people and fighting for a podium position in this weekend's race.

"Realistically we have the pace to run in the top five even but nobody is sure of our ultimate pace yet, because we did not run to our full potential in the test.

"Our aim is to really run trouble-free race and then we're on the podium. Even if we drive it nice and easy. We have an excellent driver line-up and I don't anticipate us making any mistakes.

"We are a dark horse for this race and we might surprise a few people. Watch this space."