The Qualifying session for the FIA World Endurance Championship will be changed for the 2024 season.
The changes comes into force, in an already big change of the race format, with LMP2 and GTE Am dropping out, and being replaced by the new LMGT3 category. Those are the well known GT3 cars from other championships, but with iluminated numbers, and the three colors dots on each side of the car, indicating top 3.
But that in itself has nothing with the qualifying to do.
The change is that Hypercar will have their own 12 minutes qualifying session, followed by 12 minutes for LMGT3, where all the cars from the respective categories can participate. When those 2 x 12 minutes are done, the top-10 in each category will go into Hyperpole, where each category gets 10 minutes to set the final grid.
Photo: JJ Media
Hyperpole was a concept that was introduced for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, to give some more excitement for the spectators and tv audience, since their previous qualifying format was spread over two days, with many hours of running, so nobody knew if Pole was set in the first or the last 10 minutes, making it very difficult to cover.
So the new format in the FIA WEC will most likely last just over an hour.
The FIA WEC 2024 season starts on 25 February in Qatar.
