How an “informed gamble” enabled Toyota to beat Alpine in the Fuji 6 Hours

Clever, lucky, audacious? All those words could be used to describe Toyota’s win on home ground in Sunday’s Fuji 6 Hours. But perhaps the best description of the late-race move that pulled another World Endurance Championship victory out of the hat for the Japanese manufacturer would be “informed gamble”. 

Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa prevailed on a day that they didn’t look like they were truly in the mix aboard the #8 Toyota TR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar. Victory once again came courtesy of the Cologne-based Toyota Racing squad’s prowess on the pitwall. 

After the safety car was called with approximately 55 minutes of the race remaining, the team opted to put less fuel in the car than its rivals and forgo a change of tyres, all in the name of track position. As a result the car with Hirakawa at the wheel vaulted from sixth on the road to the top of the classification. 

Toyota’s gamble was that the race was going to remain neutralised for some time and therefore anything approaching a full dump of fuel wasn’t necessary. The winning car’s virtual energy tank sat at just over 70% capacity as #8 left the pits, whereas the cars that had been ahead of it were well into the 80s, if not 90s. Vital seconds had been saved. 

It turned out to be the correct decision. The race didn’t go green until just 20 minutes were left on the clock. Hirakawa’s cause was helped by the fact that the fastest car on track at Fuji, the #36 Alpine A424 LMDh with Victor Martins at the wheel, had dropped from first to fifth in the kerfuffle of the safety car. Not only had he fallen behind another short-fueller, the #15 WRT BMW M Hybrid LMDh of Dries Vanthoor, but also Charles Milesi in the sister Alpine and Marco Sorensen’s Aston Martin Valkyrie LMH. 

The time it took Martins to get past the three cars between him and the leader proved crucial in the outcome. 

Alpine looked on course for a 1-2 in Fuji before the final safety car

Photo by: JEP

Martins, who was part of a duo this time in the Signatech-run Alpine alongside Jules Gounon, took nine laps of the 2.84-mile Fuji Speedway to make it up to second, leaving him only seven to try to regain the top spot. He never quite got close enough, the French car trailing the Japanese machine across the line by six tenths of a second. Toyota had used all its nous to claim a third victory of the season, once again without having the fastest car. Only in the final hours of the Le Mans 24 Hours has that been the case when its rebodied LMH has prevailed. 

Toyota’s tactics to take the win with #8 at Imola in April were inspired. Its ability to overcome the electronic glitch on the #7 TR010 driven by the winning crew of Kamui Kobayashi, Nick de Vries and Mike Conway at Le Mans impressive. This one resulted from a bit of punt, one that was definitely worth taking on the basis of the prevailing evidence.

If there was any luck in Toyota’s 10th victory in the Fuji WEC round was the reaction of its competitors to the fourth and final safety car of the race at Fuji. None of the teams ahead of it expected such a long clear-up, though perhaps closer attention to the TV pictures might have resulted in them opting for a similar strategy to Toyota. 

“You just look at the TV and try to guess how much shorter the race will be and how much energy you can save” David Floury

The #58 Garage 59 McLaren 720S GT3 Evo driven by Finn Gehrsitz had a coming together with #27 The Heart of Racing Aston Martin Vantage GT3 with Luca Drudi in the cockpit at the end of Fuji’s long main straight. A double side-to-side contact as they battled over 11th place in LMGT3 sent the McLaren into unprotected Armco-style barriers with some force and at an almost head-on angle. 

The conclusion drawn by Toyota that the race would remain under the safety car for some time was the obvious one to reach. It seemed clear that the clear-up was going to involve more than hauling the damaged McLaren out of the gravel and a bit of sweeping up. 

“You just look at the TV and try to guess how much shorter the race will be and how much energy you can save,” said Toyota Racing technical director David Floury matter-of-factly of the thought process behind his team’s tactics. So none of the blue-sky thinking of Imola or the rocket science of Le Mans. “I would not have bet on that one, but when the opportunity comes, you have to be sharp and take it,” added the Frenchman. “We were lucky with the safety car today and it afforded an opportunity.” 

The damage to both the #58 McLaren and the barrier meant for a lengthy safety car period

Photo by: FIA WEC / DPPI

A clear opportunity for Signatech and Alpine to notch up a second Hypercar victory with its LMDh a year on from its first was passed up on Sunday. This was a race that they really should have won. It would not be overly harsh to suggest it was thrown away when it came to crunch time. 

The two French cars were running 1-2 at the time the yellows flew for the final time. Alpine had the fastest car on Sunday: its two LMDhs led 166 of the 203 laps and ran first and second for much of the way. Yet in the heat of the battle it went far too conservative strategically.

A decision was made to pit both its cars together as soon as the pits opened after three laps behind the safety car. That presented a problem in itself, because Martins was running ahead of Milesi, #36 in front of #35. That meant the leader would arrive first and Milesi would have to nose into his pit stall. Martins didn’t lose any time blocked in behind the sister car because the decision was made to give him two new tyres, Michelins softs, on the hard-used left side of the car. The team had gone into the final hour intending to make the change because it had tyres left in the bag after Martins had undertaken a double and a bit on taking over the car from Gounon at the first round of stops. 

Alpine sporting director Nicolas Lapierre, exactly two years after his last race as a driver with the team, held his hand up and took responsibility for the tactics, at the same time as drawing some positives from a day on which Milesi and Ferdinand Habsburg ended up fourth. “Obviously seeing the cars at the front for most of the race, it is disappointing not to win,” said the Frenchman. “We didn’t want to sacrifice a car so we boxed the two at the same time. Therefore we lost time and got overtaken by a few cars. I think we could have won the race and finished far [off] with the other one if we sacrificed it, but we decided to go with the team spirit, going [for the win] with two cars. Second and fourth [#35 remained behind the BMW Vanthoor shared with Kevin Magnussen and Raffaele Marciello] is still a very good result for the team - we scored our record number of points in a race weekend with 30 points.”

Lapierre’s suggestion that it might have won had it sacrificed one of the cars probably wouldn’t have played out. Both spent too long in the pits during the crucial final stops: the #36 was on pitroad for 67s, #35 slightly less at 63s. The winning Toyota was timed at just 50.7s from pit-in to pit-out. 

The misfortune for Alpine was that the race went straight to safety car after the Gershitz/Drudi incident. More usually a race will be neutralised first with a Virtual Safety Car whereby the cars run around at 80km/h before the course vehicle joins the track and closes up the field. Pitstops are allowed under the VSC, which generally triggers a mass stampede for the pits. 

Even if Alpine sacrificed one car, its chances of victory were slim due to its conservatism on fuel and tyres

Photo by: FIA WEC / DPPI

Had the cars made their final stops under VSC on Sunday, Alpine would probably have finished 1-2, #36 most likely ahead of #35, no matter how bold Toyota was on its fuel strategy. Martins led Milesi by three or so seconds when the neutralisation came, while the third-place Aston driven by Sorensen and Alex Riberas was more than six down on the second of the A424s. Hirakawa, meanwhile, was the better part of 20s in arrears of the leader. There would have been less for Alpine to lose behind the VSC because those on-track gaps would have been maintained, rather the pack being bunched up behind the safety car. 

And there’s the irony in Alpine’s failure to repeat its 2025 Fuji victory this time around. The key moment of the race 12 months ago came with two and a half hours to go when the #35 car shared by Milesi, Habsburg and Paul-Loup Chatin made a scheduled stop moments before a Full Course Yellow, which unlike a VSC results in the closure of the pits. After the FCY had to be turned into a safety car, against normal practice, when it became obvious that the clear-up would take longer than expected, the cars that probably would have beaten Alpine that day had to make so-called emergency pitstops during the three laps during which the pits were closed and then return for a service proper. Had a VSC been called initially, Alpine would most likely not have won. 

A VSC before the safety car this time would probably have resulted in an Alpine victory. That it lost out came down to its own conservatism and Toyota’s gumption. 

The #8 Toyota crew of Buemi, Hartley and Hirakawa have jumped to the top of the drivers' standings

Photo by: JEP