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Ford believes it was "shocking" the majority its GTE Pro rivals could not challenge it for pole on its return to the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Dirk Muller and Ryan Briscoe secured the brand-new Ford GT a one-two on the grid for its Le Mans debut, with its other entries fourth and fifth.

AF Corse's lead Ferrari 488 GTE was within four tenths of Muller's pole lap but Porsche, Aston Martin and Chevrolet were considerably off the pace.

UPDATE: Ford and Ferrari pegged back for race

Muller's 3m51.185s was 4.8s quicker than last year's pole time, with the general 2016 upgrades for GTE Pro cars thought to account for half of that time.

Porsche made a marginal improvement from last year's qualifying times but the Astons and Corvettes were slower.

"The big mystery to me was where was everyone else?" Ford driver Richard Westbrook told Autosport.

"It's shocking they haven't progressed. It's been strange.

"I wasn't surprised by the time at all - we've got a huge diffuser and more power so these times were predicted."

Raj Nair, Ford's executive vice president for global development and the marque's chief technical officer, said his car's qualifying time was expected.

"From where we were at the test and where we were at the first practice session, with the changes that we made and with a full qualifying set-up, that's where we expected to be," he told Autosport.

"For whatever reason it wasn't where we expected Porsche and Corvette and Aston to be.

"We're still learning what set-up this car likes. Certainly it likes a light [fuel] load on [new] sticker tyres! It really comes alive."

Ford has come under fire for its near-five second improvement from the test day to race week.

"There's a lot of data we've provided and we've been very open with any issues with the new car and the changes we've been making," Nair said.

"We're doing all kinds of things on the test day on full tanks, on tyres, seeing how the car's going to do on double stints, trying different set-ups.

"This car was designed for this track - it doesn't take an engineer to look at our cars and say it's good aerodynamically."

Adverse conditions meant little dry running on Thursday night, but three of the Ford managed multi-lap runs in the small window.

Nair said there was "too much of a gap" between Ford's qualifying and race set-ups but admitted that was a more welcome issue than focusing on reliability after its difficult 24-hour debut at Daytona earlier this year.

"The issues we had at Daytona were not unusual for an all-new programme," he said.

"There were niggling frustrations but we've got that behind us and the car's run pretty reliably in the last couple of races in the US and in Europe.

"This is a long race, there are no guarantees, but it's good to be working on getting speed into the car rather than reliability issues."