REBELLION Racing will start on pole for Saturday’s Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach thanks to a strong qualifying run by Swiss driver Neel Jani behind the wheel of his Toyota-powered #12 Rebellion Racing car. A continually improving track saw the top cars consistently trading positions throughout the first half of the qualifying session until Jani set a time of 1:12.600 on his seventh lap. From that point, the REBELLION Racing squad couldn’t be knocked off pole, with their closest competitors, the #16 Dyson, finishing the session 0.683 seconds behind.
The team is extremely pleased to have taken pole their first time contesting on a street circuit.
Today’s position is REBELLION Racing’s second in the ALMS. The team took their first pole at Petit Le Mans last season and went on to win the race. REBELLION will be looking for repeat performance in tomorrow’s grand prix.
The ALMS Toyota Grand of Long Beach will take place at 4:30pm PST, 00:30 GMT.
Neel Jani
“A very good qualifying today. I’m a bit surprised about the big gap to the other P1 cars because we’ve never run with our car on a street circuit before. We improved the car quite a lot from this morning’s practice session. A big thanks goes to the team and our engineer James [Robinson] for producing such a great car having never been here before. But tomorrow is another day so we will see how it goes.”
Nick Heidfeld
“Great job by Neel today, putting the car on pole with quite a big gap to the others. Now we’re focusing on tomorrow’s “sprint race” which will be quite different from the longer races that we are used to. It’s good that we are starting up front because of the shorter race. Being on a US street course also means that there will probably be many yellow flags, so it will be very important to drive well and have a good strategy, like we did in Sebring, to compete against the other teams who are used to the more frequent safety cars.”