Garage 59 Tops Qualifying; Superpole Places Set

The No. 59 Garage 59 McLaren 720S GT3 Evo topped a stop-start qualifying session for the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, which saw the top 20 cars advance to Friday’s Superpole shootout.

Joseph Loake, Marvin Kirchhoefer and Benjamin Goethe put in a combined time of 2:16.454, outpacing the No. 31 Team WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO of Dries Vanthoor, Sheldon van der Linde and Marco Wittmann by 0.505 seconds.

The No. 22 Schumacher CLRT Porsche 911 GT3 R was third, followed by a pair of Mercedes-AMG entries from GetSpeed Performance and Winward Racing in fourth and fifth.

The No. 163 Vincenzo Sospiri Racing Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2 of Sandy Mitchell, Franck Perera and Marco Mapelli took sixth, followed by the pair of AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3s in seventh and eighth, respectively.

The No. 007 Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo and No. 998 ROWE Racing BMW M4 GT3 EVO rounded out the top ten.

The remainder of the top 20 almost entirely consisted of cars from the Pro category, with the exception of a pair of Gold Cup cars as Verstappen dot com Racing and Herberth Motorsport advanced through to the Superpole shootout in 14th and 19th, respectively.

The other cars to advance include the No. 18 Dinamic GT Porsche, No. 34 Walkenhorst Motorsport Aston Martin and No. 63 GRT Grasser Racing Team Lamborghini.

All remaining Pro-entered BMWs also pushed through into Hyperpole as Ugo de Wilde, Charles Weerts and Kelvin van der Linde took 15th in the No. 32 Team WRT machine, one spot ahead of the No. 98 ROWE Racing car.

Valentino Rossi, Rene Rast and Kevin Magnussen narrowly avoided elimination in 20th place, with their No. 46 BMW just 0.037 seconds faster than the Silver Cup-entered No. 42 Century Motorsport entry.

The No. 96 Rutronik Racing Porsche No. 9 Boutsen VDS Mercedes-AMG also advanced, making up the top 20 for Friday’s shootout.

Amongst the cars to miss out on Superpole were the No. 911 Pure Rxcing Porsche and No. 64 HRT Ford Performance Mustang GT3, as well as the No. 00 Goodsmile Racing Mercedes-AMG.

In total, four red flags were called across the four segments of qualifying, three of which came during a heavily interrupted opening session.

Most significant was a crash for the No. 611 Nordique Racing Mercedes-AMG of Tim Sandtler, which made heavy contact with the barriers at Raidillon. Sandtler walked away from the crash under his own power.

Nicolas Baert hit the tire barriers at Stavelot in the No. 21 Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin in changeable conditions during the first segment, while Louis Machiels spun into the gravel at Les Combes.

A fourth red flag was triggered when Sebastian Alvarez spun the No. 11 Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin into the gravel at Fagnes.

As the first segment of qualifying was extended multiple times as a result of the red flags, the scheduled night practice session has been pushed back to 11:59 p.m. CEST (5:59 p.m. EST).