What is Hyperpole and how does it work?

Where the format came from

Hyperpole was introduced for the 2020 24 Hours of Le Mans only. Before then, Le Mans qualifying had been three open hour-long sessions across two days, with no shootout. The ACO wanted to compress the qualifying narrative into a single climactic Saturday session before the race start, both for spectacle and for broadcast. The format proved successful enough at Le Mans that the WEC adopted it for every round of the championship.

How a qualifying day runs in the WEC

The first session of the day is the open qualifying, sometimes called Q1. Every car runs in this session, lap-timing on its own programme. The window is short, usually 12 to 15 minutes, which forces teams to commit to a single fast run rather than build up across multiple stints. The session sets the grid for every car from the Hyperpole cut-off down to the back.

The transfer cut-off depends on the round. At Le Mans, the top six per class transfer to Hyperpole. At every other WEC race since 2024, the cut-off is eight cars in Hypercar and eight in LMGT3. The cut-off is set before the season starts and does not move.

The Hyperpole session itself runs separately, with only the transferred cars on track. The session is between 10 and 30 minutes; at Le Mans the Hyperpole window has historically been 30 minutes, run after dark. Drivers can complete several timed laps, but tyre allocation rules mean most teams have one realistic shot at pole.

What is at stake

The headline prize is the pole position itself. In the WEC, the pole-sitter in each class earns one championship point.

Beyond the point, Hyperpole sets the front of the grid for the race. At Le Mans this matters less than at a road-course round because the race is 24 hours long and the grid order rarely correlates with the final result. The 2025 race was won by the No. 83 AF Corse Ferrari 499P starting from 13th, so the Hyperpole order itself does not predict outcomes well at Le Mans. At a 6 Hour round, where the field stays bunched longer, the Hyperpole order matters more.

Hyperpole also generates the year's marquee qualifying laps. The fastest pole at Le Mans in the Hypercar era was set by Kamui Kobayashi in the No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid during the 2022 Hyperpole, at 3:24.408 around La Sarthe.

How tyre rules shape the session

Each Hyperpole car gets a small fresh-tyre allocation for the session, on top of the race-weekend allocation already in use. The exact tyre allocation is published in the FIA Sporting Regulations and varies by round. The practical effect is that a team usually commits to one out lap, two fast laps, and one cool-down lap. A driver who flags the timing system on the first fast lap, or who gets caught in traffic, often runs out of tyres before they get a second clean run.

The combination of a single shootout and a tight tyre window is what makes Hyperpole feel different from open qualifying. A small error costs a row of the grid. A clean lap can promote a customer car ahead of its factory rivals for an evening.

What it tells us about the WEC qualifying experience

Hyperpole pulls the qualifying climax into a fixed 30-minute window for broadcast. It produces one defining lap per session and a clear pole-sitter. The two-stage format has stuck because it works for the audience and because the cut-off is generous enough that no genuine front-running car is filtered out by Q1. Most rounds in the Hypercar era have produced a top-eight transfer that read like the eight cars the audience would have picked themselves.