The No. 6 Sascha Maassen/Lucas Luhr/Emmanuel Collard Penske Porsche RS Spyder, which has had a successful week of practice sessions, has earned the LMP2 class pole for Saturday's 54th running of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring.

Lucas Luhr, the German driver now living in Monaco, turned the fast qualifying lap, which not only broke the class record at Sebring, but was faster than the last year's LMP1 pole time. Luhr, the American Le Mans Series GT2 class champion in 2002 and 2003, was also on the winning GT2 team at Sebring here last year, but is glad to be in a prototype for 2006.

"The Penske team has been very pleased with the performance of the Porsche RS Spyder all week, and we have shown that performance by earning the pole for the race. But no one in the paddock will tell you that they are confident they will finish the 12 Hours of Sebring. It's a long, hot, bumpy event," said Luhr.

Luhr also mentioned that, although he has had much success here: five class wins. He will look forward to his first Sebring in an open cockpit race car, as his GT2 cars were very hot during the daytime hours.

Luhr.s pole effort put his entry third overall on the grid behind the LMP1 Audi R-10s, and two-tenths of a second ahead of the No. 7 Penske Porsche RS Spyder team car of Timo Bernhard/Romain Dumas/Patrick Long, qualified Thursday by Bernhard.

In the GT2 class, the Bell Microsystems Alex Job Racing Porsche 911 GT3 RSR, entered for Graham Rahal/Klaus Graf/Mike Rockenfeller, and qualified by Rockenfeller, is fourth on the grid behind the two Panoz entries and the Ferrari 430. Porsche has won the GT class at Sebring every year since 1992.

The next fastest Porsche in GT3 was the Petersen Motorsports/White Lightning Porsche 911 GT3 RSR of Jorg Bergmeister/Tim Bergmeister/Nic Jonsson, followed by the Flying Lizard Porsche 911 GT3 RSR of Johannes van Overbeek/Jon Fogarty/Marc Lieb.