Northwest AMR claim top Aston Martin honours in earlier WEC Bahrain 6hr Qualifying

Friday, October 29, 2021

As usual, the GTE Qualifying session of the World Endurance Championship has again not failed to throw everything up into the air again as previously fast cars all see their actual race starting position to end up much further back to what had been suggested earlier.

This afternoon’s GTE Qualifying ahead of Saturday’s 6Hours of Bahrain was much this case again as the early pace setting Porsches all eventually lost out to a first-time pole position for the #60 Iron Lynx Ferrari and with a mix up of the three Aston Martin Racing Vantage GTE’s in the middle as well.

Right through to the end of Free Practice 3, the #33 TF Sport AMR GTE Am car of Ben Keating, Dylan Pereira and Felipe Fraga had been the top Aston on the timing screen as they laid chase to the then leading Project 1 and Dempsey Proton Porsche’s.

The #777 D’Station Racing (also a TF Sport prepared car) of Satoshi Hoshino, Tomonobu Fujii and Andrew Watson was the second fastest Aston through the Free Practice sessions, in turn keeping themselves within reach of the faster GTE Am Championship chasing #33 car.

Then came the #98 Northwest AMR of Paul Dalla Lana, Marcos Gomes and Augustus Farfus who delivered a ‘just in time performance’ to steal a P2 in class performance during their allotted five laps of Qualifying with Dalla Lana behind the wheel. That was also despite the #98 car having a lap deleted for track limit abuse!

Despite delivering a comparably fast Qualifying lap to their fastest lap in Free Practice, the #33 car of Keating only managed a P6 starting position whilst Hoshino brought back a best lap time of around their three Free Practice times to only be worthy of a P10 start within the class of thirteen cars.

Tomorrow’s green flag drops nice an early for those of us in the UK at 09:00 (11:00hrs in Bahrain) as Keating, Dalla Lana and Fujii take the opening stint in this opening six hour race in the Kingdom of Bahrain but in the heat of the desert, tyre preservation will be critical for all.

Photo credits – Adrenal Media / Teams / AMR