A fond farewell to a few WEC favourites

As a season ends, there are always farewells to be made. There were some pertinent ones at Monza last weekend as the 2026 World Endurance Championship campaign drew to a close. We said goodbye to Mike Conway, Alpine and, most probably, Sebastien Bourdais as a frontline sportscar driver competing for victories at the front of the grid. The shame is that there couldn’t be a fairytale ending for all three; that wasn’t really possible given there can only be one winner. 

The chances of Conway and team-mates Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries overhauling Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa in the other Toyota to take the WEC drivers’ crown were always slim given the numbers. By that I mean the 17-point deficit in the classification going into the championship finale and those contained within the Balance of Performance table. We don’t know what they were, of course, but Toyota conceded that it wasn’t going to be a contender in Italy save for some kind of seismic strategic heist a la Fuji. 

It seemed a bit unfair on Conway that, as he bowed out as a professional racing driver, the #7 Toyota TR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar was battling over the minor placings. It wasn’t a fitting end to a stellar career, and probably not what he’d envisaged or hoped for either. 

At least Alpine got to fight for the victory in its final race for its WEC programme. On another day, Jules Gounon and Victor Martins might have taken victory for the French marque’s A424 LMDh. Another win for a manufacturer that has been part of the modern endurance scene since Signatech boss Philippe Sinault persuaded the Renault brand to lend its name to his LMP2 programme in the European Le Mans Series back in 2013 would have pleased me. 

I’ve always had a soft spot for Alpine, not least because I discovered a weekly motorsport magazine called Autosport at the back end of 1977. So Le Mans ’78 was the first edition of the race, the event that would become the focal point of my professional life, that I closely followed and read about in detail. Alpine, thankfully, has remained cognisant of its rich history in endurance racing: the Alpine-Renault A442B Group 6 car that triumphed that year with Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud was on display at Monza as the marque took its bow.

It wasn’t to be for Alpine, and the main reason for that was Bourdais. He managed to hang onto the lead aboard the Jota Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh he shared with Jack Aitken and Earl Bamber in the face a stiff challenge from Martins in the middle of the race. With no running on a dry track previously in the weekend, Bourdais had to get to grips with the Caddy on slicks all the while fending off a driver who’d already been at the wheel of his mount for a stint. Martins suggested afterwards that the race was essentially lost for Alpine at that stage. 

Alpine bowed out of the Hypercar ranks with a narrow defeat - but was still able to pay homage to its history

Photo by: FIA WEC/DPPI

Bourdais proved once again in his dotage that he’s still got it. It’s only three years ago that he made it into the Autosport Top 50 on the back of a phenomenal performance for Caddy at Le Mans - it merited more than the fourth place in which his Ganassi entry finished. But time doesn’t stand still, we all know that, Bourdais included. He’s been around the block (multiple times over, you could say) and knows what’s what, and has always said it how it is. 

At 47, he was fully aware that he wasn’t a long-term bet. It was difficult for him to envisage a new contract at a time when Cadillac was looking to increase the crossover between its programmes in WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship. After he and his team-mates lost a real chance of victory at Le Mans this year with the failure of what he called a “two-dollar part”, he openly speculated about whether it had been his last chance to win his hometown race. He concedes that at the end of a journey with Cadillac that started back in 2020 when he signed up to race for JDC-Miller MotorSports DPi-V.R Daytona Prototype international in IMSA, his chances of landing another manufacturer deal either in Hypercar in WEC or in GTP over in the North American series are slim.

The JDC-Miller deal was the start of a new chapter for Bourdais after he called time on a career in US open-wheelers that encompassed a quartet of Champ Car titles with Newman/Haas as well as six race wins in the IndyCar. He had always competed in sportscars, as should be expected of a son of Le Mans born in the maternity clinic adjacent to Tertre Rouge, but he was never a full-timer. He always had a single-seater career on the go, first in the junior ranks up to a championship-winning campaign in Formula 3000 in 2002, then over in North America with a brief diversion to Formula 1 with Toro Rosso over a season and a half in 2008-09. 

That passion remains undimmed even though it’s probably over for Bourdais in the big time. He wants to continue driving some kind of sportscar next year (and, lest we forget, he’s always been a bit of an all-rounder), though he concedes that as a platinum-rated driver in his late 40s, opportunities are limited

Bourdais made his endurance debut at Le Mans in 1999 as a 20-year-old competing in Formula 3. He joined Larbre Competition to race a Porsche 911 GT2, and every year bar one up to the end of his single-seater career, he managed to get his bum in a sportscar of some type, and quite often multiple types. The exception, not surprisingly, was his full season in F1 in ’08. 

Given his successes in Champ Car in particular, it’s easy to overlook his achievements in sportscars. His tally of outright victories includes one in the Daytona 24 Hours two each in the Sebring 12 Hours and Petit Le Mans US enduros, and also a win in the Spa 24 Hours in its second year back as a sportscar event (he was runner-up in the first). There were four wins racing Peugeot’s 908 LMP1s in the Le Mans Series and Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, a total of 10 overall triumphs in IMSA and one before that in Grand-Am. Nor should we forget a couple of victories in the FIA Sportscar Championship nearly a quarter of a century ago. 

Missing from his CV, however, is victory at Le Mans. He notched up a class win with Ganassi racing the Ford GT in GTE Pro in 2016, but it looks like he’ll have to make do with a trio of runner-up spots in the overall classification, all notched up in 908s. They include the near miss of 2011 when the car he shared with Simon Pagenaud and Pedro Lamy fell short by a tad under 14s in one of the greatest editions of the French classic. He might well have won in 2009, too, had not Peugeot invoked team orders ridiculously early and it had to put to bed its failures of the previous two years. 

Bourdais, far right, has three runner-up finishes at Le Mans - and one GTE Pro class win - but it looks likely he'll never be able take an overall victory

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

Bourdais’s enthusiasm for sportscar racing remained strong throughout his career. He even raced at Le Mans during his second year of F1, though that did have something to do with the fact that he was expecting to get dumped by Toro Rosso for ’09. A rarity now and then, he got in there as the first current F1 driver to do so this century before Nico Hulkenberg and Fernando Alonso. 

That passion remains undimmed even though it’s probably over for Bourdais in the big time. He wants to continue driving some kind of sportscar next year (and, lest we forget, he’s always been a bit of an all-rounder), though he concedes that as a platinum-rated driver in his late 40s, opportunities are limited. He seems at one with his failure to get that elusive outright Le Mans win but is keen to continue doing what he loves, whether that be in LMP2, GT3 or whatever. He says he just wants to be part of a team that believes in him.

If it is game over for Bourdais at the highest level, then we got our fairytale at Monza on a day of farewells. No one should begrudge him one last big win.

Bourdais ends what is likely to be his last top class WEC race on a high

Photo by: JEP