Sao Paulo Saturday Notebook

***Kamui Kobayashi scored Toyota’s 40th FIA World Endurance Championship pole position by setting the fastest time in Hyperpole ahead of the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo. The Japanese manufacturer also claimed its 24th front row lockout with Sebastien Buemi setting the second-fastest time.

***Kobayashi, who had only been third-fastest in the first part of qualifying, said a change in strategy for Hyperpole in the chilly conditions at Interlagos paid dividends. “With my first set of tires before Hyperpole, I couldn’t get enough temperature, but in Hyperpole I was allowed to do my best lap one lap earlier than [first] qualifying,” he said. “That was the main success for this pole position.”

***Matt Campbell set the best time for Porsche Penske Motorsport in the first part of qualifying but suffered an off on his out lap at Hyperpole on his way to third in the No. 5 car. “I locked the rears on the last corner on my out lap,” the Australian told Sportscar365. “It’s tricky with these cars with the rear axle locking, and I struggled a bit with that for the whole session. But still a strong performance to start on the second row.”

***Meanwhile, Callum Ilott slipped from second in first qualifying to seventh in Hyperpole aboard the No. 12 Hertz Team JOTA Porsche. “I didn’t have the same grip or feeling,” Ilott told Sportscar365. “It just didn’t click for me. I felt really competitive in first qualifying and then I went into Hyperpole and it just didn’t feel the same.”

***Another driver to suffer a difficult Hyperpole was Alessandro Pier Guidi, who was ninth-fastest in the No. 51 Ferrari 499P. “For sure we did not have the pace to fight for pole position, but I probably lost a couple of places in Hyperpole,” Pier Guidi told Sportscar365. “I had to abort the first lap and the second one was not ideal. One car cut the chicane and decided to stay in front, which I don’t think was fair.”

***Peugeot’s Jean-Eric Vergne described the French marque’s qualifying showing as “embarrassing” after struggling to the 17th fastest time in first qualifying. “There is no other word for it,” added Vergne. “We are nowhere. It’s starting to take a toll on all of us I think. We need to get out of this situation and try to improve this car. But there is no excuse, no explanation, nothing. We didn’t have the pace and that’s it.”

***Warmer conditions are forecast for race day, with ambient temperatures forecast to reach 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), up from 15 degrees C (59 degrees F) on Saturday.

***Porsche Penske managing director Jonathan Diuguid explained that the improved pace of the Porsche 963s on Saturday was largely weather-related, with cooler temperatures suiting the German manufacturer’s LMDh cars.

***Diuguid said: “We’re basically going to have three different days. Yesterday was kind of in the middle, today was very cold and tomorrow is going to be the warmest. The good thing is that we were able to use the two-car team and spread the tire work and tire load and think we have a good idea of where we want to be and understand the differences between the two compounds.”

***Diuguid predicts that Hypercar teams will mix and match the allocated Michelin Medium and Hard compound tires on Sunday. “You’re going to see Hards on some or all cars tomorrow,” he said. “I think anything is still in play in tires, whether it’s full compounds or different corners and things like that.”

***Addressing Andre Lotterer’s “pretty low” amount of drive time at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which saw the German complete less than three hours in the No. 6 Porsche 963, Diuguid attributed it to the lengthy safety car periods and track position that “quite mixed up” the drive time in the car.

***He explained: “People were trying to figure out how to react to the new safety car rules because if you stopped and changed drivers, you were going to drop a safety car. Track position was critically important at that point of the race because nobody knew how it was all going to play out.”

***Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach confirmed that it will stick with the current 90-degree crankshaft on the 963’s twin-turbo V8 engine. Porsche LMDh factory director Urs Kuratle previously stated that it would shelve plans for the initially proposed flat-plane crank if they did not encounter any reliability issues at Le Mans.

***Laudenbach said: “We are 100 percent happy with the engine we’ve got. We are in good shape. The car is extremely reliable. The car’s fast, so why should we touch it?”

***Porsche, however, could invoke its first ‘Evo joker’ for the LMDh car as soon as next year according to Laudenbach, who declined to go into detail on the areas of potential improvements. “We will for sure do something to the car,” he said. “Of course we’ll try to make some improvement for next year.”

***Toyota, Ferrari and Peugeot are the only Hypercar manufacturers known to have taken Evo jokers so far, with Ferrari the only brand to have confirmed its exact usage, of one joker, for its brake cooling-related updates rolled out this weekend.

***Buemi admits that the No. 8 Toyota crew may be called upon to assist the sister No. 7 car’s championship bid as the season goes on. Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa trail the championship-leading Porsche Penske crew by 55 points after finishing fifth at Le Mans.

***Buemi said: “The gap in terms of points is not huge. But there are a lot of people that have more points. If one car has a bad couple of races, you can catch them, but we need a lot of people to have a bad couple of races. At some point, maybe not this race, we will try to help the sister car if we can.”

***Sarah Bovy scored her seventh WEC class pole position for Iron Dames by topping Hyperpole in LMGT3. Including the European Le Mans Series, it marks the fifth time the Belgian driver has scored pole this season.

***Live coverage of the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo in the U.S. will be available on MAX through the B/R Sports Add-on, as well as on Motor Trend TV, beginning Sunday at 10 a.m. EDT Discovery Velocity will carry the full race for Canadian viewers, while various Eurosport platforms will broadcast the race as well. Click Here for the full TV details.

***The race, which is due to begin at 11:30 a.m. local time (10:30 a.m. EDT). will also be carried live on Radio Le Mans’s RS1 channel with no geo-blocks or restrictions.

John Dagys contributed to this report