Californian local star Johannes van Overbeek has earned the record of being the first Le Mans-style P2 runner to score an overall pole position in the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship.

“JVO” fought a battle with Spirit of Daytona Racing’s Richard Westbrook for the pole – eventually claiming the top spot by 0.227 of a second. van Overbeek will share the car with Ed Brown tomorrow who will lead the field to the green.

The second row of the grid is filled with P2 machines with Ryan Dalziel and Gustavo Yacaman qualifying third and fourth.

With long sweeping undulating corners, the track layout at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca was always expected to favor the P2 machines for the first time.

“I hadn’t thought about scoring my first overall pole. The ESM Tequila Patron guys have been hustling all year,” van Overbeek said.

“We’ve started to figure out the tire and the car just kept getting better and better so I think it bodes well for tomorrow’s race. The long fast corners particularly suit this kind of car, we’re still not nearly as fast in the straightaways but we make up for it in other places, so I think that will make for a very interesting race tomorrow.

“It was a little challenging for me because the predictive lap timer didn’t work so I just wanted to push hard but I didn’t want to throw it off, so I was kind of struggling with that a bit.

“But finally the car came in, the tires came in right at the end and I made up all the time coming down the hill. It feels great, I’d much rather win than coming in on the pole, but it’s a start.

“For the traffic tomorrow the GTLM cars are relatively close to us in aggregate, so I don’t think there will be a lot of lapped traffic or a lot of yellows, so I don’t think think it will be an issue unless you catch a train of GTLMs there at the end. All of those guys are very good, I’ve raced against them for a very long time and I don’t expect a lot of trouble.”

Championship leaders Ganassi Racing had a fraught session – only qualifying seventh fastest after a mid-session spin.