Malthe Jakobsen has delivered Peugeot Sport its first ever pole position in the FIA World Endurance Championship, dragging the No. 94 9X8 Hypercar to the top of Hyperpole at Spa-Francorchamps in conditions that punished anyone who blinked.
The Danish driver's lap was as much about composure as outright pace, coming hours after the same car spun at Raidillon during morning qualifying when the Michelin tyres failed to switch on across an outlap that had been compromised by track temperature swings. Peugeot's engineers responded with a tyre warm-up procedure that gave Jakobsen the confidence to attack the upper sector on his first hot run, and he duly converted.
The lap also confirmed how rapidly Peugeot's Hypercar form has shifted across the opening rounds of 2026. After two seasons in which the brand's bold aero project struggled to find peak qualifying pace, the No. 94 has built methodically through testing and arrived at Spa with a balance window that finally suits the long, flowing combination of Eau Rouge, Pouhon and Stavelot.
Will Stevens came closest to denying Jakobsen, planting the Cadillac V-Series.R in Hyperpole second to extend Cadillac's run of strong qualifying form into another European round.
"I'm happy to be disappointed," Stevens said after the session, summing up a Cadillac campaign that has steadily turned podium contention into a baseline expectation rather than a celebration.
The Briton's verdict captured a paddock-wide truth about the General Motors-supported Hypercar programme. Once a quirky outsider in WEC's Hypercar field, the Cadillac has matured into a genuine threat for poles and wins, with Stevens and Earl Bamber both able to extract qualifying time from a chassis that for much of 2025 lived just outside the top three.
Ferrari's reigning manufacturers' champions had a far more difficult afternoon. Antonio Fuoco, a Hyperpole ever-present so far this season, qualified the No. 50 499P only eighth after a session in which the Italian struggled to put together a clean lap on a circuit where the Ferrari has historically thrived. The Maranello squad will carry that deficit into a six-hour race where Spa's traffic and weather gambles often reward strong qualifying as much as race-day strategy.
In LMGT3, Hadrien David captured pole for the Akkodis ASP Lexus to deliver the Japanese manufacturer a major qualifying boost in only its second WEC campaign. The young French driver continued the Lexus RC F GT3's improvement curve and underlined a wider trend that has seen the LMGT3 grid spread its top-six honours across multiple manufacturers in 2026.
For Peugeot, the maiden Hypercar pole is a long-awaited validation of a project that has spent more time defending its concept than celebrating headline results. The lions' rear-aero-only philosophy has been a divisive engineering bet, and a front-row lock-out in the dry was rarely guaranteed across the early rounds of the 9X8 era. Saturday's six-hour race now offers the team a chance to convert the pole into a first WEC podium of the season, with Toyota and Ferrari among the cars chasing from further back.
The wider championship picture also tilts on the Spa result. Toyota's hat-trick chase, Alpine and BMW's Spa-specific upgrades, and Cadillac's quiet rise into permanent contention all collide into Saturday's six-hour race in the Ardennes, where the weather forecast remains the only certainty.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/jakobsen-peugeot-maiden-wec-pole-spa-stevens-cadillac-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
