How a recurring strength aided Toyota's WEC Interlagos domination

Toyota tried to play down any status as pre-race favourite at Interlagos on Saturday evening. It was pretty disingenuous given that it had just taken 1-2 on the grid and that the temperatures were heading upward for race day. It remains the king of looking after its tyres in the World Endurance Championship despite losing its dominance in the series this year. Surely hot conditions at a venue with an ultra-aggressive track surface were going to play into its hands.

And so it proved. Toyota notched up a second victory of the season and did so at a canter. There was luck involved, as on the occasion of its first win of 2024 at Imola, but only in determining which of the GR010 HYBRIDs prevailed in the Sao Paolo 6 Hours.

This time it was Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Sebastien Buemi who came out on top after a rare technical issue on the Japanese manufacturer’s Le Mans Hypercar. Team-mates Mike Conway, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi really should have won on Sunday.

But their eventual finishing position only served to highlight the advantage the GR010 enjoyed around the 2.68—mile Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace. They were able to fight back to fourth after losing three minutes at the very start of the third hour. The Toyota was just plain quicker than its rivals on the WEC’s return to Brazil after an absence of 10 years.

Buemi crossed the line a minute and nine seconds up on Toyota’s closest pursuer, the #6 Penske-run Porsche 963 LMDh shared by championship leaders Laurens Vanthoor, Andre Lotterer and Kevin Estre. In turn, the second Porsche Penske Motorsport entry of Michael Christensen, Matt Campbell and Fred Makowiecki was a further 7.6 seconds behind.

Ferrari, meanwhile, never looked likely to repeat its Le Mans 24 Hours victory of last month and score a first win for the 499P LMH in a regular WEC round: it could do no better than fifth with the AF Corse works entry driven by Antonio Giovinazzi, James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi. The German and Italian marques were P2 and P3 in the pecking order, but a long way behind the dominant force of the weekend.

Ferrari and Porsche had to use the harder of the two tyre compounds Michelin took to Brazil, while Toyota could run exclusively on mediums

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Toyota had a good six tenths a lap in hand over Porsche, and one or two more over the Ferrari, which put its deficit at a full eight tenths. Ferrari pointed to the Balance of Performance, though of course without mentioning those words. Doing so is precluded under the sporting regulations of the championship. They were arguing, in the vaguest possible terms of course, that it had swung against them at the start of the second half of the 2024 campaign, but there was more to Toyota’s victory than that.

The two tyre specifications sole Hypercar class supplier Michelin brought to Brazil were the medium and the hard. Toyota could make the former work on a warm winter’s day when the thermometer rose to 25 degrees. The GR010s exclusively ran on the softer of the two tyres, whereas Porsche and Ferrari had to bring the hard into play. It was a significant component of the Toyota domination at the weekend, even if there were attempts to play it down at Ferrari.

Sunday was all about “tyre strategy and tyre management” reckoned Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director David Floury. It tried the hard during the second free practice session on Friday and, he continued, “worked on the set-up to make the medium work and be consistent”.

"I am not saying that there is not room for improvement, but it will be very difficult if things remains the same" 
Ferdinando Cannizzo, Ferrari

“If you start with mediums all round, go to the hard and then try mediums on one side, it looks a bit like a test session,” said Floury cheekily of the others’ less consistent strategies. “Obviously not all the combinations can work.”

Ferrari, which also took sixth with the second factory 499P driven by Antonio Fuoco, Nicklas Nielsen and Miguel Molina, wasn’t sure that Toyota had pulled off some kind of masterstroke with the tyres. Ferdinando Cannizzo, technical boss of the marque’s sportscar programmes, reckoned that if you have a clear performance advantage you can basically do what you want with the tyres: “They were out of range: I don’t think they would have had a problem on either compound.”

Cannizzo didn’t mention the words Balance of Performance, of course. But he did point out that the 499P was the heaviest car in the race — along with the Toyota it must be said — but also the least powerful. He suggested that such a situation “makes it very difficult to find the right window to optimise the car”.

“We were very disappointed in being unable to fight,” he said. “I am not saying that there is not room for improvement, but it will be very difficult if things remain the same. It is clear that there is something missing.”

Hartley started the race, while Buemi took over qualifying duties in the winning car

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Cannizzo reckoned that Ferrari was pretty much on a par with Porsche at Interlagos, though that would be stretching it. The German LMDh had a clear but slender advantage in the region of a couple of tenths a lap over the Ferrari, which was running its first evo joker update for the first time, on Sunday. That was borne out by the results.

The two factory PPM 963s took second and third despite suffering not insignificant delays along the way. The only issue for Ferrari was a drive-through for the fifth-place 499P for a Full Course Yellow infringement early in the race.

The issues sustained by the two PPM cars ultimately decided which one finished ahead. Vanthoor lost time with a front right puncture early in the race in an incident with Will Stevens in the #12 Jota customer car. The Brit was held up ever so slightly by an LMGT3 class entry on the exit of Curva da Sol (Turn 3) and moved over on the factory car on the run to T4. He was correctly adjudged to have been at fault and was handed a 30s stop-go penalty.

The early stop put Vanthoor and his team-mates out of sync on stops, but they were up to a genuine third behind the sister car when it needed repairs of its own — or rather PPM was told to make repairs. Christensen had been hit up the rear by one of the WRT BMW M4 GT3s, though the aero numbers suggested that the damage was barely slowing the car.

Race control decided, however, that the team couldn’t continue with part of the tail section flapping in the airflow. The 21s lost when Campbell took over for the run to the flag reversed the order of the two PPM entries, Estre bringing the championship-leading entry home seven seconds ahead.

There wasn’t a lot to choose between the two cars on pace - they were separated by hundredths rather than tenths in the averages - despite divergent tyre strategies. Not for the first time this year, PPM played the percentages.

The third-placed #5 entry started on mediums all round, while the #6 set out with a hard Michelin on each corner. Only at the end of the race did #5 use the hard, the car twice getting one on the highly-stressed right rear corner in the final hours. The sister car on the other hand was mixing and matching through the race.

Despite a puncture, points leading Porsche drivers Estre, Lotterer and Vanthoor recovered to second

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Ferrari also split its strategy over the race: the sixth-place #50 car driven by the Le Mans 24 Hours-winning crew used more hards than their team-mates. Cannizzo insisted that there was little between the two strategies, though an analysis of the averages shows that #51 had an advantage of somewhere in the region of a second.

Neither PPM car was the fastest Porsche last weekend. That honour went to the #12 car that Stevens shared with Norman Nato and Callum Ilott. It was another car to use only the softer Michelin, sometimes putting new tyres on the right side and sometimes on the rear. Its comeback brought the car into the top six before Illot spun on cold tyres after his final pitstop, a stop for a new rear body section leaving the car three laps down in 18th position at the chequered flag.

Jota, winner at the pre-Le Mans Spa round, should still have come away with a top six with its second car shared by Phil Hanson, Oliver Rasmussen and Jenson Button. The last-named was fending off Pier Guidi for fourth when he was forced to stop with five minutes left on the clock for a five-second stop-and-hold penalty because the car had run its rear tyre pressures below the prescribed minimum. That dropped a car that had twice overtaken the #51 Ferrari over the second half of the race to an unrepresentative seventh.

"If you have to make an extra pitstop in this championship, you’re done. A small error will cost you dearly"
Alex Lynn

Cadillac finished down in an even more unrepresentative 13th with Alex Lynn and Earl Bamber, two laps down on the winning Toyota. The solo Ganassi-run V-Series.R had again shown genuine pace in qualifying, Lynn putting the car fourth behind the two Toyotas, Kobayashi ahead of Buemi, and Campell in the best of the Porsches.

Bamber slipped down the order over the course of his opening double because the team had opted to get rid of two of the medium tyres on which the car had qualified at the start of the race. They did the first two hours on the left side of the car, while the team went from hards to mediums in the middle of his stint on the other side.

Lynn was given hards when he took over, only to hear a strange grinding noise that was initially presumed to be a problem with the brakes. It turned out that the front right wheel hadn’t seated probably on the hub, the resulting stop robbing Caddy of another chance to show the true potential of its LMDh.

“The pace was still good over the remainder of the race,” said Lynn afterwards. “But if you have to make an extra pitstop in this championship, you’re done. A small error will cost you dearly.”

Cadillac appeared to be in the hunt for a result before a problem with the front right wheel forced an extra stop

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The privateer AF-run Ferrari finished a couple of places higher in the hands of Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Robert Shwartzman after delays of its own. Kubica was tapped into a spin early in the race and then Ye was given a drive-through from contact with the #20 WRT BMW M Hybrid V8. Lynn’s comments could very much be applied to the yellow Ferrari as well.

Peugeot was best of the rest at Interlagos with the revised 9X8 2024 that came on stream at Imola in May. Nico Muller, Mikkel Jensen and Jean-Eric Vergne scored the best result for the French manufacturer’s mk2 version of its LMH, surpassing the ninth position it claimed on debut.

Muller shone in the second half of the opening double — “I’ve never overtaken so many cars in this programme”, he said — but the truth was that the Pug wasn’t the fastest of the cars in the midfield pack. It owed its unofficial class win to a tyre strategy based on exclusively running the hard until going onto the mediums used for qualifying as the temperatures dipped at the end.

“If you can’t be fast, you’ve got to try to be smart,” said Peugeot Sport technical director Olivier Jansonnie. “We had low deg right through the race, which is why even with pace that wasn’t so good we were able to finish where we did.”

BMW took ninth with the #15 M Hybrid of Dries Vanthoor, Raffaele Marciello and Marco Wittmann that ran exclusively on the hard Michelin. Marciello reckoned eighth was about as good as it was going to get for the Bimmer.

“We did a very good race, no mistakes or problems, but it would have been very difficult to be any higher,” he said. “But of course, we want to be fighting at the front: we need to continue working hard to improve and catch up.”

Alpine was back in the points after its Le Mans disaster when both Signatech-run A424 LMDhs were out within six hours. In Brazil, there was no repetition of what was confirmed as a valve problem - a known issue on the car’s 3.4-litre single-turbo V6 — despite new parts having yet to arrive. Team boss Philippe Sinault explained that Alpine would be “managing the engine in a different way to avoid having this problem again” ahead of the race.

Alpine rebounded after its Le Mans double retirement to score a point with Lapierre, Schumacher and Vaxiviere

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

For Sinault, the important thing wasn’t scoring a point for 10th with the car shared by Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Mick Schumacher, but that the programme was back on track after the disappointment of Le Mans.

“The main subject is not to score a point, but to come back on the right dynamic project,” he explained. “We have a line, Qatar, Imola and Spa, that was broken at Le Mans. Now we are back on the line.”

"We got the victory but #7 was flying today — they went a different direction on set-up. They were quicker than us and had much less tyre deg" Brendon Hartley

Lamborghini ended up 17th with its Iron Lynx-run SC63 LMDh, but the Italian car, fresh from scoring a point at Le Mans largely down to reliability, was in the battle with Peugeot, BMW and Alpine. It was pretty much on a par with the French manufacturers and quicker than the German. Its race was undone by a puncture when Mirko Bortolotti took over from Edoardo Mortara right at the end of hour four.

“It was really unfortunate because it was looking good,” said Daniil Kvyat, who started the car. “I think today we showed that we are in the fight for points.”

A puncture thwarted Lamborghini's SC63 that had shown comparable pace to its fellow WEC newcomers

Photo by: JEP

Toyota's 'wrong' winner

The wrong Toyota won at Interlagos. Wrong in terms of the one the Japanese manufacturer would have wanted to win given its position in the championship and wrong in terms of pace displayed on track during the race. The #7 entry, third in the points going into the Brazilian weekend compared to the sister car’s eighth, was the quicker car .

Hartley didn’t pretend that he, Buemi and Hirakawa would or could have beaten their team-mates on Sunday. He conceded that they had a significant advantage both in terms of outright pace and tyre degradation.

“We got the victory but #7 was flying today — they went a different direction on set-up,” he explained. “They were quicker than us and had much less tyre deg.”

That much was apparent on track. Conway converted Kobayashi’s pole into the race lead as Hartley went off on the asphalt run-off at the Senna S. He explained that he wanted to brake as late as possible to ensure he wasn’t overtaken at the same time as avoiding his team-mate.

After that, he could only watch as Conway, back in harness after missing last month’s Le Mans 24 Hours through injury, disappeared up the road. Hartley was a couple of seconds down inside two laps and more than five in arrears before the race was into double-figure laps.

That had turned into 12s by the time of the first Toyota stops, both cars remaining on the four mediums on which they had started. The gap stood at nigh on 20s when Conway had to take a drive-through for speeding under the first of the race’s three FCYs. The Brit was only behind for three laps before retaking the lead.

“My tyres fell off a cliff and was suddenly two or three seconds a lap slower,” said Hartley. “There was nothing I could do before I made that early first stop [eight laps before the leader].”

Still, Hartley enjoyed himself on his first race start since joining Toyota for the 2019/20 season. He and Buemi swapped roles for Interlagos, the Swiss taking qualifying duties for the first time since the opening round of that season and giving Hartley the chance to kick things off.

“We haven’t had a great season and it’s not looking good in the championship,” said Hartley. “We just wanted to mix things up a bit.”

Hartley admitted that the sister #7 car was the faster of the Toyotas

Photo by: Toyota Racing