McNish starts sixth for Spa 1000kms

Scot Allan McNish will line up sixth on the grid for tomorrow’s second round of the Le Mans Series, the 1000kms race at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium after his team-mate Tom Kristensen struggled in qualifying.

The Dane, a seven-time winner of the Le Mans 24-Hours race and driving a turbo-diesel Audi R15plus, made contact with the LMP2 pole-winning Acura of Englishman Danny Watts at La Source.

“There’s no question there was some damage made to Tom’s car,” McNish, who watched Kristensen set a fastest time of 1min 59.795secs on the 4.3-mile track, explained afterwards.

“It was one of those things which can sometimes happen during a high pressure qualifying session when there’s 50 cars on-track. What matters though is we know we have a fast race car and we’ve 1000 kilometres to race on Sunday.

“That’s a hell of a long way. We know we have a strong car and driver line-up, so I’m comfortable we’ll be pushing for the win when it comes to the end of the race.”

McNish’s main rivals, Sebastien Bourdais, Pedro Lamy and Simon Pagenaud, will start from pole position in their Peugeot.

The French trio topped the timesheets with a lap of 1m57.884s, just 0.635s quicker than McNish’s Audi team-mates Timo Bernhard, Romian Dumas and Mike Rockenfellar.

St Andrews racer Andrew Kirkaldy lines up third in the GT2 class, and 32nd overall, in his Ferrari F430GT. The Fifer, partnered by Englishman Tim Mullen, were just 0.475s slower than the Ferrari of polesitter Jaime Melo.

JM

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