The Lexus RC F is bowing out of the FIA World Endurance Championship this weekend from 6-8 November, and it is doing it right from the front. Hadrien David put the Akkodis ASP Team machine on pole position on a damp-but-drying track surface at Monza with a stellar performance.
This is the second career pole for the rising French star, and the fourth for the Japanese marque, following his previous top spot at Spa-Francorchamps earlier this year. Sharing the #78 car with team-mates Tom Van Rompuy and Esteban Masson, David will be hunting the top step of the podium after a 2026 season where Akkodis' race day efforts have been repeatedly hampered by ill-fortune, leaving runner-up spoils in the 24 Hours of Le Mans as the squad's solitary silverware to-date.
"We've struggled a lot over the past few races, so this is a good day for the team," enthused 22-year-old David. "We were expecting to be fast because we know the Lexus is strong in these conditions, when it's very cold and we have big straights – and it felt great! Having not had any session before that in the dry, it wasn't easy to set the car up, but the team did a great job and I need to give them a lot of credit because I couldn't do this without them. We know our weak point tomorrow will be tyre wear, but fortunately, this track is usually quite low in terms of degradation so hopefully we can finish the season on a high."
Pole initially looked to belong to Heart of Racing Team's Eduardo Barrichello, a driver boasting an unrivalled Hyperpole record in LMGT3 over the last two years. The Brazilian Aston Martin driver stopped the clocks almost half-a-second quicker than anyone else, only to immediately lose the lap due to a track limits transgression.
That dramatic twist elevated championship leader Jonny Edgar to the front row, as the #33 TF Sport Corvette star aims to become FIA WEC's first solo champion in more than a decade. The Briton ended up a mere 0.014s shy of David, marking the second-narrowest gap in the history of the production-based division.
Ben Tuck placed the best Proton Competition Ford Mustang third on the grid, four spots ahead of home hero Giammarco Levorato in the sister car, while Barrichello was ultimately classified fourth. The second Lexus and Aston Martin entries completed the top six, with the #34 Racing Team Turkey by TF Corvette and #92 The Bend Manthey Porsche—the only two cars that can still deny the #33 Corvette the crown—taking 10th and 11th respectively. Meanwhile, the #69 Team WRT BMW, the sole other competitor capable of challenging for championship honours coming into the weekend, exited the title chase after qualifying a lowly 16th.
The 6 Hours of Monza will begin at 11:00 local time (CET) tomorrow on Sunday, 8 November.
