Spa pole-sitter Bernhard shocked by Porsche’s big advantage

The fastest non-Porsche 919 was the #6 Toyota in third, which was 1.905s off the pace set by Bernhard and Brendon Hartley in the #1 car.

When asked if he was surprised about Porsche’s qualifying advantage, Bernhard replied: “Yes, absolutely. When we saw [Brendon] do a 1m55.6s, that was about what we expected, but I would say that we were really surprised that the competition was two seconds slower.

“Brendon did a perfect job, I had his lap time on my dash so I knew exactly what I had to do. The lap was pretty good and we did really similar lap times, which at the end is really important with this kind of qualifying format."

Looking ahead to tomorrow’s race, Bernhard is expecting a stronger challenge from Porsche’s rivals.

“It's a lot hotter at Spa than we expected,” Bernhard added. “We know that this track is very rough, so the temperature has an impact on tyre wear.

“The team or car which manages the tyre wear the best will win tomorrow. I think on pace we will be better.”

Lieb bemoans poor qualifying lap

The 0.797s gap between the #1 Porsche and its sister car was mainly put down to Marc Lieb’s lack of pace relative to his teammate Neel Jani.

“The session was actually a disaster for me, because I didn’t get a clean lap at all,” Lieb admitted to Motorsport.com. “Just a poor lap, lots of mistakes, I overdrove a bit.

“Anyway it was enough to be in front of the competition, but #1 is too far ahead and has been since Silverstone. We’re still investigating why that is, and why we are always behind.

When asked what he needs to find relative to the #1 car, Lieb replied: “We need to find balance, we are struggling with that.

"At the moment, using the same set-up, we can’t do the same lap times, so we have to go in different directions and we haven’t found a solution yet.”

Additional reporting by Jamie Klein and Filip Cleeren