The tiny increments that decided the final LMP1-era WEC

Toyota sealed a Le Mans 24 Hours hat-trick on the way to claiming a third World Endurance Championship title, and Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez finally took the crown after a trio of seasons together. But 'three' wasn't the most important number over the course of the 2019-20 season elongated by COVID-19. It was actually 0.00455.

That's what you end up with if you subtract 0.008 from 0.01255. The difference between those two numbers defined a campaign that began in September 2019 and stretched all the way to November 2020.

The two figures relate to the system of success handicaps - a modern take on success ballast - introduced for the swansong of LMP1. It was conceived to close up the competition between the Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs and the non-hybrid privateer opposition from Rebellion Racing and, initially at least, the works Team LNT Ginetta squad, and to ensure the remaining LMP1 manufacturer didn't waltz away to the title.

The system penalised individual cars according to their points advantage over the worst-placed LMP1 entry in the championship, up to a maximum of 40 points and not counting pole position points. It all sounded very plausible - a good idea, even - when explained by the handicaps' architect-in-chief, Toyota Gazoo Racing technical director Pascal Vasselon.

But something went wrong between the formulation of the handicaps and their execution. Ahead of their first deployment at round two of the campaign at Fuji, the per-point, per-kilometre coefficient used to calculate the penalties was changed from 0.008s to 0.01255s.

The increase of more than 50% had a devastating effect on the championship: it broke up the battle between the Toyotas, the only real highlight in the top class over the course of the 2018-19 WEC superseason; and it ensured that when the penalties were stacked against the Japanese cars, Rebellion as the only credible and consistent privateer entrant could win with consummate ease so long as it didn't screw up.

It is hard to interpret the increase as anything other than a panic move by the FIA Endurance Committee, the WEC's kitchen cabinet, after Toyota dominated the Silverstone opener. The TS050s, now racing in a new high-nose configuration, were a long way up the road despite a double increase in minimum weight ahead of the season under the Equivalence of Technology. The Toyotas ended up 28kg heavier than in the six-hour races at the end of 2018-19.

The season can be summed up by what happened in the first two races after Silverstone. At Fuji in October 2019, the #7 Toyota of Conway, Kobayashi and Lopez was penalised by 1.4 seconds after winning the opening round, the #8 car of Sebastien Buemi, Kazuki Nakajima and Toyota newcomer Brendon Hartley by exactly a second. The car with the lesser penalty led every lap over the six hours and would have finished much more than 30s up the road had Nakajima not been penalised for speeding in the pitlane.

Had the two eight-hour fixtures in Bahrain been just six hours and the results the same, then Buemi, Nakajima and Hartley would have been champions by 184 to 181 points, rather than trailing 202 to 207

The Toyotas, with a win and a second apiece, were each pegged back to the tune of 2.74s (by reductions in their fuel and hybrid boost allocation), the Rebellion by 0.89s (with weight) for Shanghai. Such was the Swiss entrant's advantage that Bruno Senna, Gustavo Menezes and Norman Nato won by over a minute despite the last-named dropping 30s in the opening stint.

The drivers of the #7 TS050 ended up winning the title, despite being more heavily penalised than their team-mates in three of the six races in which the handicaps were applied. They were equal in one, and Buemi and co were on the wrong end of the system on two occasions.

There were two telling factors in the outcome of a championship battle between two evenly matched crews. The first was that Kobayashi and his cohorts overcame a bigger handicap than the sister car to win when the WEC got going again at Spa in August
after its COVID pause. The second was that the eventual champions carried less in the way of penalties at the two eight-hour fixtures in Bahrain, when more points were on offer.

Had those two races been just six hours and the results the same, then Buemi, Nakajima and Hartley would have been champions by 184 to 181 points, rather than trailing 202 to 207. The rejig of the WEC resulting from COVID undoubtedly played into the hands of title winners, because they would have had to endure the greater handicap at the cancelled Sebring 1000 Miles eight-hour race scheduled for March.

Le Mans, rescheduled to the autumn as a result of COVID, for once didn't prove crucial in the outcome of the championship, even though it was back to double-points. The handicaps system was never intended for use at the most important race of the season, partly because the EoT was perceived to have done its job in 2019, so it was a straight fight between the TS050s as Rebellion failed to replicate its form of the previous season.

Both Toyotas had problems: relatively minor braking issues on #8; a holed exhaust on #7 that cost 29 minutes. It was another dose of bad luck at Le Mans for Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez, who perhaps had the narrowest of edges over their team-mates.

Had they finally won the race, they would have been more or less home and dry in the championship. Because they didn't, it was actually better for their title assault that they only recovered as high as third behind the #1 Rebellion.

Buemi and co raced with a 0.54s handicap to the sister car at the Bahrain finale, a race at which the calculations were made only on the basis of the Toyotas' scores in the absence of any LMP1 opposition. The differential would have been only 0.13s had their rivals finished second at Le Mans.

It might have been possible to overcome such a deficit, whereas 0.54s was just too much. The drivers of the #8 car had no chance in the winner-takes-all shootout in the desert. Some little numbers had a big impact on the 2019-20 WEC.

Last-minute switch rewards United Autosports

United Autosports made a late call - and a big one at that - just before its first full World Endurance campaign. It paid dividends. The British squad won four of the eight races, including Le Mans, and wrapped up the drivers' title with Filipe Albuquerque and Phil Hanson with a round to spare.

The team owned by McLaren Racing boss Zak Brown and Richard Dean opted to switch to the ORECA chassis from Ligier just a couple of weeks ahead of the official pre-season test at Barcelona in July 2019. It was a big decision given that the team was - note the use of the past tense - also the UK importer for the Ligier marque.

United emerged from the chassis swap with a consistency that its rivals couldn't match - across individual races or the season. Albuquerque and di Resta were more often than not the fastest of the pros, and Hanson was always up there among the best of the silver-graded drivers

United hit its stride with the ORECA-Gibson 07, co-driven by Paul di Resta in all bar one of the races, almost immediately. It was in the mix in round two at Fuji (where di Resta, on DTM duty at Hockenheim, was replaced by Oliver Jarvis), finishing third despite an electrical problem, and would almost certainly have won at Shanghai but for a visor tear-off partially blocking the engine intake at the start.

A first LMP2 victory followed in Bahrain, and after the turn of the year United embarked on a run of victories that encompassed three straight wins in the WEC and another four on the trot in this year's European Le Mans Series.

United emerged from the chassis swap with a consistency that its rivals couldn't match - across individual races or the season. Albuquerque and di Resta were more often than not the fastest of the pros, and Hanson was always up there among the best of the silver-graded drivers. The team again ran on Michelin tyres, the French supplier having the edge over rival Goodyear for much of its final season before Goodyear takes over the exclusive supply of the grid next year.

No other car managed to win more than once. Jota Sport claimed top honours with its ORECA shared by Anthony Davidson, Antonio Felix da Costa and Roberto Gonzalez at Shanghai, and notched up a further four podiums on Goodyear tyres, and lost another to disqualification at Fuji. Third in the points behind di Resta for da Costa and Gonzalez (Davidson missed Silverstone through injury) was impressive given that the Mexican is a genuine silver more than twice the age of some of his opposite numbers.

Jota also won the Bahrain finale with the ORECA it fielded under the Jackie Chan DC Racing banner. Gabriel Aubry barged his way past da Costa with 10 minutes of the eight hours to go to seal the win on a day when Goodyear with a new tyre, the B-spec that had come on stream at Le Mans, was in the ascendancy. That gave his team-mates, Will Stevens and Ho-Pin Tung, fifth in the championship behind Davidson, though Aubry ended up seventh after missing the Spa round following a positive test for COVID-19.

Racing Team Nederland also made it into the winners' circle after a switch of chassis, from Dallara to ORECA, at the same time as it moved from the Dayvtec operation to TDS Racing. It may seem strange to say that a team blessed with the talents of Nyck de Vries and Giedo van der Garde punched above its weight, but it really did. Few would have predicted that, with bronze-graded Frits van Eerd, RTN could make it onto the podium (which they did on four occasions), let alone win (which they did at Fuji).

The Swiss Cool Racing operation claimed a solitary victory at the Silverstone opener. Its ORECA won with just Nicolas Lapierre and Antonin Borga driving when amateur Alexandre Coigny was ruled out through injury. When Coigny was in the car, it wasn't a factor.
Lapierre's departure from Signatech Alpine left the reigning champion team as a shadow of its former self. With Thomas Laurent, Andre Negrao and Pierre Ragues driving, it failed to win a race for the first time since joining the WEC in 2015.

Aston finally flies in the dry

Aston Martin won races in the first season for its second-generation Vantage GTE in 2018-19. What was new for its second campaign was an ability to take victory in GTE Pro in the dry. That allowed Nicki Thiim and Marco Sorensen to reprise their 2016 world title and the British marque to seal the manufacturers' crown for the first time.

The Danes won three of the eight races, while the sister car shared by Maxime Martin and Alex Lynn took the most important of the car's victories at Le Mans when they were joined by Harry Tincknell. The difference between the latest Vantage's maiden season and its second was that it now had Michelin slicks under it that could hang on for a double stint.

The late decision by the Prodrive-run Aston Martin Racing squad to switch back to Michelin from the Dunlops that had helped it win the title in 2016 and Le Mans the following year with the old car counted against it over the 2018-19 season. It didn't begin testing on the French rubber until the December ahead of a season in which the tyre allocation for qualifying and the race was reduced.

Aston and Michelin basically ran out of development time ahead of the new Vantage's first race the following May. The British manufacturer's misfortune was that it had to go through the 18-month superseason, encompassing two editions of Le Mans, with the three specs of slick tyre developed in double-quick time.

A car that had got through 24 hours on one set of brakes had problems making them last over eight hours in the Middle East. All four Astons in the race needed new pads at the front, although a distant fifth place for Thiim and Sorensen was easily enough to give them the title

The development programme for 2019-20 started straight after Le Mans 2018. The revised-construction tyres that it produced allowed the Vantage to finally compete with its rivals, now just Porsche and Ferrari after the withdrawals of Ford and BMW, in dry conditions. The car's one-lap pace, or its speed in the wet, had never been in doubt, but now it could be competitive over a full race distance.

The Astons lost a shot at victory at the Silverstone opener when the team rolled the dice on keeping the cars on slicks during what wasn't quite such a brief shower as it believed, but Thiim and Sorensen won next time out at Fuji, the latest Vantage's first win in anything approaching dry conditions. Two more victories followed for the Danes in the first of the Bahrain races and then at Austin.

Martin and Lynn hadn't finished better than third prior to Le Mans, a chance of victory lost on more than one occasion because they were the losers when AMR opted to split its strategies. But at Le Mans they were in the ascendency in the Aston camp and, together with Tincknell, came out on top in a battle with the AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE Evo of James Calado, Alessandro Pier Guidi and Daniel Serra.

Lynn, Martin and Tincknell looked to have the edge over the Italian car, and then Aston put the result beyond doubt when the winning Vantage was able to make it through the 24 hours without a change of brakes. Their rivals did have to change brakes, which had until September been regarded as de rigueur in the class.

The victory gave Martin and Lynn an outside shot at the championship, though the Briton was ruled out when he failed a COVID test before travelling to the Bahrain finale and was replaced by Richard Westbrook. A car that had got through 24 hours on one set of brakes had problems making them last over eight hours in the Middle East. All four Astons in the race needed new pads at the front, although a distant fifth place for Thiim and Sorensen was easily enough to give them the title despite Martin and Westbrook beating them home by one position.

Calado, who took victory at Shanghai with Pier Guidi after disqualification for a rideheight infringement was overturned, had what can be described as a mathematical chance of the title in Bahrain. It disappeared when Serra, who came in when the Italian was given the job of upholding Ferrari honour in the GT World Challenge Europe finale at Paul Ricard, broke a wheelrim when he tagged a GTE Am Porsche. Ferrari might have been closer to repeating its 2017 title with Calado and Pier Guidi but for bad luck. A drivethrough penalty at Silverstone and a puncture at just the wrong time in Bahrain last year cost them points.

Porsche claimed a third win of the season in the Bahrain finale with the second iteration of its mid-engined 911 RSR. Reigning class champions Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen were the model of consistency, finishing second or winning (at Spa and Bahrain 2) when they didn't have problems. That they did have problems in two of the races, double-points Le Mans included, left them third in the championship. A damper change in Bahrain first time around and then power-steering failure at the 24 Hours robbed them of any chance of retaining the title.

The second Porsche of Gianmaria Bruni and Richard Lietz gave the new RSR a debut win at Silverstone. They only made it onto the podium on a further two occasions on their way to seventh in the points.

Emmanuel Collard and Francois Perrodo reprised their 2016 GTE Am title with the AF Corse Ferrari squad, this time sharing their 488 GTE Evo with new factory driver Nicklas Nielsen. Consistency was their watchword: they won at Silverstone and Spa, took an all-important second at Le Mans and never finished lower than fourth.

That contrasted with the four wins, Le Mans included, from the TF Sport Aston crew of Charlie Eastwood, Jonny Adam and Salih Yoluc. They effectively lost the title in Bahrain - twice over. Without either of the problems they encountered in the WEC's two eight-hour fixtures, they would have been champions. A fuel filter problem did for them in the first of the two desert races, the same brake issue that afflicted the factory cars in the second.