Mucke mixes it with the diesels at Le Mans.

The Charouz Lola Aston Martin emerged as one of the stars of qualifying for the Le Mans 24 Hours after Stefan Mucke managed to split the diesel cars on the grid for the French classic.

After a podium finish in the opening round of the Le Mans Series, the new closed coupe Lola has endured a difficult run of form after a number of new car niggles, and that looked like continuing on the opening day of qualifying after gearshift problems left the car down in 17th place on the provisional grid.

However, with those issues resolved on Thursday, the car started to make its way up the order and by the end of the third two-hour session, Mucke had lifted the #10 entry to eighth overall and second of the petrol-powered LMP1 machines with a best lap of 3m 29.273s.

In the final session however, Mucke was one of a number of drivers in the field to go out and post his quickest time of the week and a stunning lap of 3m 25.158s saw the Lola move ahead of the #1 Audi R10 to take sixth on the grid - nearly two seconds quicker than any of the other petrol cars.

"The time was a good one, although it just came to me rather than being the result of a particularly big effort," Mucke, who will share the car with Jan Charouz and Tomas Enge, said. "The best thing about it is that our time is genuinely indicative of our race pace; we weren't using a special qualifying set-up. That's a very positive sign for the future."

Mucke's performance in qualifying drew credit from Aston Martin Racing team principal George Howard-Chappell after a session that saw the works DBR9s qualify fourth and fifth in GT1.

"Overall it's been a very pleasing qualifying session," he said. "We're particularly pleased with the qualifying session from Stefan Mucke.

"The LMP1 team had quite a difficult time getting dialled into Le Mans but to split the Audis was a great achievement."