Alessandro Pier Guidi put Ferrari on top after he recorded the fastest lap time in the opening Free Practice session for the 6 Hours of Monza.
The World Endurance Championship’s 6 Hours of Monza round’s opening practice saw Ferrari driver Alessandro Pier Guidi beat Ye Yifei’s privateer Jota Porsche to the top spot.
In a 90-minute practice that was stopped with just over two minutes remaining due to a red flag, Le Mans 24 Hours champion Pier Guidi driving the #51 Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar edged off Ye Yifei’s Porsche 963 LMDh by just 0.003s.
In the car he shares with James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi, Pier Guidi recorded a fastest time of 1m37.533s. Prior to Pier Guidi’s improvement, Calado’s time had been 0.076s slower than Yifei’s.
Hertz Team JOTA was pushed to second place by Pier Guidi’s performance, which came towards the end of the Friday’s 90-minute session.
Ye Yifei led the pack of the factory Porsches run by Penske driven by Michael Christensen, who finished third ahead of Mike Conway’s #7 Toyota GR010 HYBRID despite bringing out the full course yellow in the opening laps.
The Glickenhaus-Pipo 007, which claimed the Monza pole last year, finished fifth, splitting the two Toyotas, with Olivier Pla posting the car’s fastest time. In the #8 Toyota, Sebastien Buemi finished sixth narrowly ahead of Nicklas Nielsen’s #50 Ferrari and Laurens Vanthoor’s #6 Penske Porsche who finished seventh and eighth respectively.
Richard Westbrook placed the only Cadillac V-Series.R operated by Chip Ganassi in ninth place while Nico Muller rounded out the top 10 in the best of the two Peugeot 9X8s at the venue of the program’s WEC debut last season.
Esteban Guerrieri driving the Vanwall Vandervell 680 and Jean-Eric Vergne in the sister #93 Peugeot were in pursuit of the Swiss driver, who finished behind the fastest time by a second.
The new Proton Competition Porsche, which was taking part in the WEC for the first time, rounded out the 13-car Hypercar field. Harry Tincknell set the fastest time, which was 1.774 seconds slower than the first-place finisher.
In the LMP2 category Robert Kubica led a WRT 1-2 as the Pole’s #41 ORECA-Gibson 07 finished in 1m40.356s, 0.205s faster than Ferdinand Habsburg’s sister #31 entry.
In the Le Mans-winning Inter Europol Competition ORECA, Albert Costa finished third outpacing Gabriel Aubry’s Vector Sport entry and Charles Milesi’s #36 Signatech-Alpine.
In the No. 54 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE Evo, Davide Rigon finished first in GTE-Am, setting a 1:47.538 to beat Matteo Cressoni in the Iron Lynx Porsche by 0.107 seconds.
Beyond the Christensen FCY, FP1 was halted a further two times, with a second Full Course Yellow coming out due to debris at the first Lesmo.
With three minutes left, there was a late red flag brought out by an incident involving the No. 56 Team Project 1 Porsche 911 RSR-19 and a software glitch at race control.
