Conway, Lopez lead Toyota to Silverstone WEC pole

Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez combined to score their first pole position of the FIA World Endurance Championship season in the #7 Toyota TS050 Hybrid in qualifying for the 6 Hours of Silverstone on Saturday, edging out Fernando Alonso and Kazuki Nakajima by two-tenths of a second.

After being stripped of pole at Spa over a technical irregularity and then taking P2 for the start at Le Mans, the #7 Toyota crew finally overhauled the sister #8 car to top qualifying by four-tenths of a second in the 20-minute qualifying session at Silverstone.

Conway managed to beat Alonso's benchmark on the first runs in qualifying by just two-hundredths of a second before Lopez took over and put in an impressive second time to give the #7 Toyota an average lap time of 1m36.895s.

A slower effort from Nakajima meant the #8 Toyota finished 0.411 seconds back in second place, but the team was nevertheless able to lock out the front row of the grid as the rival non-hybrid privateer LMP1 cars finished more than a second off the pace.

Jenson Button will start his first home race at Silverstone in over two years from third place after teaming up with Vitaly Petrov for SMP Racing in the #11 BR Engineering BR1 AER in qualifying, finishing two seconds back from Lopez and Conway's average time. The #17 SMP Racing entry took fourth in class, a further one-tenth of a second behind.

Rebellion Racing was left to settle for P5 and P6 ahead of the #10 DragonSpeed entry, while ByKolles propped up the order in LMP1, finishing eighth overall.

Jackie Chan DC Racing swept to a one-two finish in LMP2 qualifying, finishing over a second clear of the rival teams in its class as Jazeman Jaafar and Babil Jeffri took pole in the #37 Oreca 07 Gibson, leaving Gabriel Aubry and Stephane Richelmi to settle for P2 in the sister #38 entry, finishing less than two-tenths of a second behind.

Signatech Alpine Matmumt's #36 Alpine A470 Gibson will start third in LMP2 ahead of TDS Racing in P4, while Racing Team Nederland was able to cling on to P5 in class despite team owner Frits van Eerd going off-track at Copse and beaching his car in qualifying, causing a brief red flag period.

DragonSpeed took sixth in LMP2 despite a difficult session for Pastor Maldonado in the #31 Oreca, who had two spins and had two lap times deleted for exceeding track limits. Maldonado and teammate Roberto Gonzalez ultimately finished 2.3 seconds back from class pole, with the #50 Larbre Competition Ligier JS P217 Gibson taking 15th overall in LMP qualifying.

GTE-Pro saw Stefan Mücke and Olivier Pla combine to score their first pole position of the season for Ford, edging out the resurgent Aston Martin Racing team by seven-hundredths of a second. Pla and Mücke recorded an average time of 1m55.727s in the #66 Ford GT to take pole ahead of Alex Lynn and Maxime Martin in the #97 Aston Martin Vantage GTE, with the sister #95 Aston Martin finishing third in class.

Team Project 1 took its first class pole in the WEC after topping GTE-Am qualifying at Silverstone with Egidio Perfetti and Jörg Bergmeister in the #56 Porsche 911 RSR. An average of 1m59.001s saw the duo finish two-tenths of a second clear of Christian Ried and Matt Campbell in the #77 Dempsey-Proton Racing Porsche, while TF Sport took P3 in class with the #90 Aston Martin Vantage.

The 6 Hours of Silverstone starts at 12pm local time on Sunday.