Jota Sport Beats Greaves to Wet Estoril Pole

Jota Sport’s Filipe Albuquerque secured pole position for his home race in a wet qualifying session at Estoril, beating Greaves Motorsport driver Jon Lancaster on a drying track.

The Portuguese driver and his Gibson 015S Nissan set the fastest time of 1:43.510 just before the end of the session, right before yellow flags effectively ended any chance of improving laptimes.

As a result of taking pole position, Jota Sport now enters the final round of the 2015 European Le Mans Series season with a two-point advantage over Greaves Motorsport.

Minutes before Albuquerque set the fastest time Jon Lancaster had put the No. 41 Greaves Motorsport Gibson 015S on top, beating Krohn Racing’s Olivier Pla by just one thousandth of a second.

In his first qualifying for Thiriet by TDS Racing Nicolas Lapierre qualified the No. 46 Oreca 05 Nissan in fourth place, ahead of the No. 21 AF Racing BR01 Nissan of Mikhael Aleshin.

Pegasus Racing driver Leo Roussel, who had been fastest for most of the session, eventually qualified in sixth place.

Team LNT secured the front row in the LMP3 class. Michael Simpson beat teammate Charlie Robertson to pole, while Garry Findlay qualified the new Graff Ligier JS P3 in third place. The gap between the new Ligier and the Ginetta on pole was 1.351 seconds.

Franck Perera (TDS Racing) and Richard Lietz (Proton Competition) claimed poles in GTC and GTE, with the BMW Z4 GT3 outpacing the GTE cars in the wet. BMW Team Marc VDS qualified last in its final qualifying session, after a gamble to go out on slicks didn’t pay off.

RESULTS: Qualifying