COTA Saturday Notebook

***Robert Kubica scored the No. 83 AF Corse Ferrari 499P’s first pole in FIA World Endurance Championship competition in qualifying for the Lone Star Le Mans, as well as a first for a privateer car in the Hypercar era. It also marks the Polish driver’s second WEC pole following his first in 2023 Monza round for Team WRT in the LMP2 class.

***Meanwhile, Giammarco Levorato’s pole in the No. 88 Ford Mustang GT3 marked the first for the Proton Competition-run program since the inception of the class last year, and is the Blue Oval’s first WEC pole since the 2019 Spa race, when Harry Tincknell and Andy Priaulx took GTE-Pro qualifying honors in their Ford GT.

***While the entire LMGT3 field stuck to slicks in the mixed conditions during qualifying, both Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA cars as well as the No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid gambled on a change to wet tires in the first session. The move backfired for all three cars, as Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Kamui Kobayashi all ended up at the bottom of the timesheets.

***Lynn explained that Cadillac opted to change to wets on both cars after the team had trouble getting the slick tires up to temperature in the damp conditions. He told Sportscar365: “I think on slicks, we couldn’t get the temperature in them, hence why we both went for wets. We both had the same gut feeling, hence why we both called it the same. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. That’s racing.”

***For his part, Kobayashi explained that Toyota’s position as the closest garage to pit in at COTA pushed him towards gambling on wets. “With our garage position, we have to push to overtake the other cars, and we have to run on the damp part of the track, which made warming up the slicks very hard,” he told Sportscar365. “To find space I had to back off and I lost heat in the tires, and so I decided to switch to wet tires, which obviously didn’t work. The garage position hurt us quite a lot.”

***The sister No. 8 Toyota ended up qualifying seventh in the hands of Ryo Hirakawa, who said he “didn’t want to gamble” on wets. “Hyperpole was very tricky,” Hirakawa told Sportscar365. “I thought the conditions were stable but somehow it was getting worse and I missed the window to push, so I didn’t set a proper lap time.”

***Porsche Penske Motorsport’s Kevin Estre believes the No. 6 car that qualified third, after the No. 93 Peugeot was stripped of its qualifying times, “would have struggled a bit more” had qualifying taken place in the dry. He told Sportscar365: “The session was quite good for us, even if it was very challenging to read the track.”

***BMW driver Dries Vanthoor, who wound up eighth, explained that traffic led him to abort a flying lap in the closing stages of Hyperpole, with his subsequent final attempt then coming to a premature end when he spun off the track at Turn 5.

***Vanthoor told Sportscar365: “In hindsight it’s easy, I should have finished the lap. It would have put me somewhere in the top five. Together with my engineer, I decided to go for the next lap, which was not the right call. It just started to rain more. You can call it unlucky, in the end I should not have backed off. I should have finished the lap. It’s a lesson learned and I’ll make sure it does not happen again.”

***Aston Martin’s Harry Tincknell said he regretted the mixed weather conditions preventing the chance for The Heart of Racing to capitalize on its strong practice pace, as the two Valkyries concluded the day ninth and 14th. “When you have neither car outside of the top seven in any practice session, it’s a bit of a shame,” Tincknell told Sportscar365. “In the damp, we just really struggled to switch the tire on.”

***Valentino Rossi qualified fourth in LMGT3 aboard the No. 46 BMW M4 GT3 EVO, behind the two Proton Fords and Sean Gelael’s United Autosports McLaren. Reflecting on his Hyperpole performance, Rossi said: “Our car works very well in these difficult conditions and we get good feedback from the tires. These conditions are better for us than the full dry, especially if it’s very hot, because we suffer a bit more. P4 is not so bad for tomorrow. We hope the conditions are a bit like this, and not too hot.”

***Brendon Hartley will become the sixth WEC driver to reach 80 starts on Sunday, joining Toyota stablemates Sebastien Buemi and Mike Conway, as well as Richard Lietz, Christian Ried and James Calado in that exclusive club.

***Lietz, meanwhile, will make his 90th start, becoming only the second driver to do so after Buemi, who reached the milestone at Le Mans.

***In another significant milestone for a Toyota driver, Kamui Kobayashi will make his 75th WEC start, while Cadillac’s Alex Lynn notches up his 50th start.

***Penske Racing President Jonathan Diuguid said the factory Porsche Hypercar squad appears to be in a better position at COTA compared to last year in race trim.

***Diuguid told Sportscar365: “I think we’ve made significant improvements from our performance last year. This was the most difficult track for us on the WEC calendar, just from a pure performance standpoint. We’ve definitely improved ourselves. It will be about making the right decisions around pit cycles and getting track position and things like that. I think our long-run pace is competitive, which is all we can look forward to.”

***The Porsche 963 is now the third-heaviest Hypercar, behind the Toyota and Ferrari, in the Balance of Performance for this event. “We’re one of the heaviest cars now and I think depending on how you look at it, we have the lowest power,” Diuguid added. “Those two things combined, one abuses the tires and another one hurts our straight-line performance. It’s challenging but I think our group and the team is doing a good job.”

***Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach told reporters Saturday that it’s “too early” for confirmation of Porsche’s factory LMDh programs for next year. Sportscar365 understands that a board-level decision was due to be made last month but has been delayed amid a possible change in Porsche’s CEO, with Oliver Blume currently holding a dual role, also as Volkswagen’s chief executive.

***Laudenbach said: “I think we have to make [a decision for 2026] quite soon. We are not under time pressure, so I’m not saying it’s before Fuji or after Fuji, but within the next weeks, yes. We’re not setting ourselves under pressure. There’s no need to.”

***Diuguid revealed that under his recently promoted position as Penske Racing President, he will have to take a “step back” from his current involvement on the sports car racing front next year, should the WEC and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship programs both continue, although his previous position as Porsche Penske managing director is likely not not be filled.

***He told Sportscar365: “We haven’t decided how that’s exactly going to look yet. We’re still waiting for the IndyCar schedule to come out and see what the clashes are looking like. In general, yes, I’m going to have to take a step back from how involved I have been. We haven’t made any of those hard decisions yet but I would say as far as the day-to-day business, obviously I’ll be focusing on higher-level stuff just based on the role.”

***Diuguid credited the already established management structure within Porsche Penske, which includes general manager Jan Lange, business and operations manager Tobias Durheimer and team manager Francis Schammo in the WEC, as well as Joel Svensson, who is team manager on the IMSA side. Both Diuguid and competition director Travis Law were promoted to over-arching roles that include overseeing the team’s NTT IndyCar Series program in July.

***Coverage of the Lone Star Le Mans will be carried live in the U.S. on HBO Max as well as MotorTrend TV, beginning Sunday at 1 p.m. CST, led by the broadcast team of Martin Haven, Anthony Davidson and Graham Goodwin, with Shea Adam filling in for an absent Bruce Jouanny on pit lane reporter duties. Click Here for the full TV and streaming schedules for tomorrow’s race.

***Bob Varsha, one of the most well known American voices of motorsport, returns to the booth this weekend to call the race on the trackside PA system alongside Jonathan Green and Jon Massengale, who are all part of the Speed City broadcast team.

John Dagys & Davey Euwema contributed to this report