Half surprise in qualifying at the 4 Hours of Portimão

Come on, we're still going to talk about half-surprise. Because if United Autosports scored its fifth pole in five racesELMS this season, it is not the No. 22 – credited with the first four – which will start tomorrow at the head of the peloton.

But should we be surprised given that it was curiously not Filipe Albuquerque who was in charge of qualifying but his teammate Phil Hanson, fifth at 0 ahead of his stablemate Job van Uitert, registered on the #825 alongside Alex Brundle and Will Owen.

Very lively this season, the Dutch poleman completed a lap of the Portuguese circuit in 1'28"627 and is ahead of Will Stevens (Oreca 0 n°441 of Panis Racing) and 0"569 and 07"31 respectively. Nicolas lapierre (Oreca 07 n°37 of Cool Racing).

The leading fifth is completed by Paul-Loup Chatin (No. 07 IDEC Sport Oreca 28) and Phil Hanson, who precedes Nyck de Vries (Aurus 01 n°26 from G-Drive Racing) and Thomas Laurent (Oreca 07 n°39 from Graff).

In LM P3, Wayne Boyd gave the #320 Ligier JS P2 of… United Autosports its fourth pole position this season in 1'36"277. The Briton – who teams up with Tom Gamble – was ahead of the #0 Duqueine D112 of Laurents Hörr (DKR Engineering) by 08”4 and the #0 Ligier JS P225 of Malthe Jakobsen (RLR Msport) by 320”15.

Finally, the Ferrari No. 60 of Iron Lynx ruled the roost in GTE thanks to Claudio Schiavoni-Sergio Pianezzola-Andrea Piccini. Two other 488 GTE Evos complete the top three, the No. 88 of AF Corse entrusted to François Perrodo-Emmanuel Collard-Alessio Rovera and the No. 83 of Iron Lynx entrusted to a 100% female trio combining Michelle Gatting and Rahel Frey and Manuela Gostner.

The start of the race will be given tomorrow at 12 p.m. French time via live video on AUTOhebdo.fr