Alonso not dwelling on 'least important qualifying of my life'

Fernando Alonso is refusing to dwell on "the least important qualifying of my life" after only finishing 13th in Thursday's session to set the start order for the Rolex 24 at Daytona.

Alonso will make his sports car racing debut with United Autosports this weekend at Daytona as preparation for a possible entry to the 24 Hours of Le Mans later this year.

The Spaniard finished nine-tenths of a second off the pace in qualifying on Thursday, finishing 13th overall as he failed to make up for the pace deficit of his LMP2 chassis compared to the DPi cars, but was 1.2 seconds faster than Bruno Senna in the sister United Autosports Ligier JS P217.

"Well, the first two or three laps, you just try to survive. With no tire blanket, as you said, the grip is low, the car is moving around, and you try to build the temperature slowly, lap after lap," Alonso explained.

"Then when you feel that it's time to push, you start taking some extra risk.  The last two or three laps, you know, the last two opportunities of this qualifying, and you attack what you think is the maximum, knowing that it's a 24 hour race.

"This is probably the least important qualifying of my life. Normally I have 60 laps or 70 laps to recover what I may have done in qualifying. On Saturday we have 24 hours.

"The qualifying was not the key point of this weekend, hopefully."

The Rolex 24 at Daytona gets underway at 7:40pm GMT on Saturday. For more details on how to watch, click here.