Capello dashes Kristensen's hopes of pole.

Rinaldo Capello repeated his Le Mans trials feat and pipped Audi team-mate Tom Kristensen to pole position for the 69th edition of the Le Mans 24 hours, but it took a last session effort to dislodge the Dane.

Capello waited until light rain that fell at the end of the evening's first session had cleared before embarking on his pole lap early in the second, and then dodged the ever-present traffic to duck inside Kristensen's time from the previous day.

Kristensen was denied the opportunity to respond when he suffered a slow puncture, and he was forced to settle for the outside of the front row.

"Yesterday, I knew that there was big potential in our car, but there was a lot of traffic and I got held up badly in the Porsche Curves," Capello said, "This time, I got held up a little bit at Tertre Rouge by an LMP675 car, but the rest of the lap was clear. The timing on my dashboard was not working, however, so I did not know the time when I crossed the line."

Kristensen was bitterly disappointed with the puncture, but accepted his front row position, ahead of the Johnny Herbert, Ralf Kelleners and Didier Theys Champion Racing R8 which relied on its Wednesday time for third on the grid, ahead of Jan Lammers' Dome.

The Dutchman improved his time by more than a second during the final qualifying session, but it was not enough to oust the Audis ahead. Lammers was fortunate that he had improved his time as Stefan Johansson finally realised the potential of his Gulf Audi, improving to fifth fastest after the team found a broken spring that had severely hampered his first two qualifying sessions.

Olivier Beretta, Pedro Lamy and Karl Wendlinger sat out most of the final session with their Chrysler LMP following an electrical failure. Beretta's time was good enough to maintain sixth position on the grid, however, and the Chrysler team was happy enough to spend Thursday working on the race set-up of their cars. The team fitted the race Mopar 6-litre V8 engines for the final sessions, and was not about to risk anything.

Cadillac improved massively too. The Northstar LMP crews had worked separately on their set-ups during Wednesday's sessions, and both were working until the final two hours on Thursday, when the DAMS team put similar set-up on its two cars for the final session.

Anthony Reid stunned himself and the MG team by setting 14th fastest time overall, comfortably fastest in the LMP675 category, after twice improving his benchmark in the dark. All the Chamberlain-run team's drivers were safely qualified, each completing the required three laps in the night-time sessions, and occupied first and second position in class. The cars are working wonderfully well, but the engines are still suspect. The Julian Bailey/Mark Blundell/Kevin McGarrity car suffered an oil leak and the team elected to set about the repairs during the final session, ruling out any late improvement by the #33 machine.

Didier de Radigues was denied the chance to improve on his time in the Dick Barbour Racing Reynard-Judd when the engine failed early in the second session. This left both the American-based cars behind the MGs and the solid VW-powered Reynard run by the French ROC outfit.

"We went faster today than yesterday, but the engine suddenly went at just the wrong moment," said the Belgian.

Oliver Gavin improved his pole position time in GTS behind the wheel of the factory-backed Saleen S7R, lapping in 3min 52.849secs, but was never under threat from the Corvette team that had spent the day repairing Ron Fellows' crashed car. The damage from Wednesday's accident was purely superficial, but the team concentrated on the race and lapped nearly four seconds slower than it had managed yesterday.

A battle royale developed in the LM-GT qualifying sessions. Following the rude shock of Wednesday, when Cort Wagner set pole position time in the Callaway, Patrice Goueslard had a go for pole in the Larbre Porsche entry. The Frenchman achieved the feat, but only held the position until Wagner got the message and promptly went nearly three seconds faster than his Wednesday best - closely matching last year's Porsche pole time - to remain on pole by 1.6secs! It was a fantastic achievement for Callaway, but the team is under no illusions that their new car is likely to last the 24 hours.