Antonio Giovinazzi delivered Ferrari pole position on home soil at the 6 Hours of Imola, snatching the top Hypercar slot from Toyota by the narrowest of margins in a Hyperpole shootout decided by just 0.011 seconds.
The Italian, sharing the No. 51 Ferrari 499P with James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi, set a 1m30.127s on his final flying effort to displace Toyota's Ryo Hirakawa, who had looked set to deny Ferrari in front of its tifosi until the very last moments of the session. Hirakawa's best of 1m30.138s in the No. 8 GR010 Hybrid would have been good enough almost any other afternoon.
Behind them, Antonio Fuoco kept the second Ferrari in the picture with the third-fastest time of 1m30.167s in the No. 50 entry, while Malthe Jakobsen continued Peugeot's encouraging start to the season with 1m30.200s in the No. 94 9X8 — putting four manufacturers inside the top four within just over seven hundredths of a second.
For Ferrari, the timing could hardly be better. The Maranello marque has not started a Hypercar season opener as the Imola pole-sitter in this era, and Giovinazzi's lap arrives with the championship still searching for any consistent pecking order between the Hypercar manufacturers. With Toyota, Peugeot, Cadillac, Porsche, BMW, Alpine and Aston Martin all targeting podium runs, qualifying margins of 11 thousandths underline how tight the class has become.
Hirakawa was visibly disappointed in parc ferme, but the Toyota looked well balanced through both medium and long runs in practice — a useful signal for a six-hour race in which tyre deg and traffic management will dictate far more than a single qualifying lap. The Hypercar's race pace, not its single-lap pace, has tended to be Toyota's strongest weapon at Imola.
In LMGT3, Garage 59's Thomas Fleming made a stunning series debut, claiming class pole in the No. 10 McLaren 720S with a 1m41.181s lap that beat the No. 78 Lexus by two tenths. Fleming's effort represents one of the headline rookie performances of the WEC era and marks an early statement from McLaren's expanded customer programme.
The race begins at 13:00 local time on Sunday, with daylight conditions expected throughout the running. The Hypercar field will face a strategic puzzle of two-stop versus three-stop windows, complicated by track temperatures that have fluctuated sharply across the weekend. Tyre choice between the Michelin slick compounds is expected to be the single biggest decision for engineers in the opening hours.
For Giovinazzi, the moment was about more than the lap itself. The former Sauber Formula 1 driver has now established himself as a frontrunner in Ferrari's Hypercar programme since the project was launched in 2023, and a pole at Imola — within shouting distance of Maranello — adds genuine narrative weight to his role.
Ferrari, of course, knows that pole at Imola does not automatically translate to victory in a discipline this competitive. But after an offseason in which Toyota looked the marginal favourite, the 499P's qualifying pace will give the home crowd reason to expect a fight from the lights.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/giovinazzi-pips-toyota-by-0011s-to-hand-ferrari-imola-wec-pole). Visit for full coverage.*