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Le Mans provisional polesitter Andre Lotterer expects to beat his 3m25.453s Wednesday benchmark in Thursday's final qualifying sessions - but says he will only go for another single-lap run if Audi's race preparation is completed.
The German beat his teammates in the sister #2 e-tron by 1.083sec with a lap right at the end of first qualifying.
"I was struggling with traffic all the stint long and I heard, 'Andre, we want to do a lap time in case it rains tomorrow,' so we put on new tires and tried," Lotterer told AUTOSPORT.
"I had a lot of traffic and then [engineer] Leena [Gade] told me on the radio, 'This last lap, we see nobody in front,' so we had this last chance. I had a little traffic, I lost half a second at Mulsanne maybe, there were two cars there and I'm not sure what they were doing. The lap was really nice and I managed to get it right. It was quite fun to do it like that at the last second."
Still, he said defending pole would not be top of the list for Thursday night.
"We'll try to understand the tires, how far we can go, make the car comfortable for the race – these are our main priorities," said Lotterer. "And then we'll try to squeeze in a qualifying run, but it's not like we'll be gunning for the pole all the time. We'll try it once, and if it doesn't go, too bad. We'll keep going with our program, which is learning for the race."