The “Down Under Wonders” Australian Mark Webber and New Zealander Brendon Hartley took the pole for the opening round of the 2015 FIA World Endurance Championship.

The No.17 Porsche underlined their pre-season testing pace when the 1m39.721 average lap time was three second faster than the 2014 pole time.

The No.18 919 of Neel Jani and Romain Dumas completed a Porsche front row lockout for tomorrow’s 6 Hours of Silverstone, pushing the no8 Audi R18 e-tron quattro of Lucas Di Grassi and Oliver Jarvis onto the second row by just 0.012 seconds.

Reigning world champions Toyota will start 4th and 6th with the No.1 TS040 of Anthony Davidson and Kazuki Nakajima just 0.030 seconds behind the no8 Audi and 0.661 behind the leading Porsche.

“It was a fantastic first lap,” Hartley said.

“I could see on my dashboard what my reference time from Mark was and I was fighting to bring it down. We are very happy about this pole position, but obviously tomorrow is what counts.”

Ex-Formula 1 driver Webber is back on track this week after finishing last year’s FIA WEC with a dramatic crash in Brazil.

“It was a clean session, everything went very well and we got the most out of the cars,” Webber said.

“The focus for this type of racing is not on qualifying, as we have a long race on our hands, but on the result tomorrow.”

In LMP2 G-Drive Racing also scored a 1-2 in qualifying. The No.28 Ligier JS P2-Nissan of Ricardo Gonzalez and Luis Felipe Derani beat their teammates Roman Rusinov and Sam Bird in the No.26 Ligier to the top spot by just 0.062 seconds.

The 1m48.021 average time was over one second faster than last year’s pole time, set by Rusinov and Olivier Pla in the G-Drive Racing Morgan.

Aston Martin Racing continued its strong performance and claimed a sweep of pole positions in both the LMGTE Pro and Am classes, dominating the former by filling the first three places.

The Danish duo of Nicki Thiim and Marco Sørensen set the best average time of 1:59.970 in the No.95 Aston Martin Vantage V8 to claim their first pole position of the year, 0.205s ahead of the No.99 of Richie Stanaway and Fernando Rees. Aston Martin Racing stalwarts Darren Turner and Stefan Mücke were third in class with a combined average of 2:00.333.