How BMW adapted its Spa trick to win the Sao Paulo 6 Hours

BMW claimed a second victory of this year’s World Endurance Championship at Interlagos on Sunday. This time it was the WRT team’s #15 M Hybrid V8 LMDh that took the laurels with Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor driving, though there was a peculiar similarity to the sister car’s win at Spa back in May. It explained why the German manufacturer prevailed in Brazil when it didn’t have the fastest car on the resumption of the WEC after the Le Mans 24 Hours. 

WRT won on home ground in Belgium because it pulled Rene Rast out of the pack for an early first stop to put him out into free air. Then, at the final stop it opted not to give Magnussen fresh tyres to ensure he came out of the pits ahead of the factory Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar with Antonio Fuoco at the wheel. Magnussen became Robin Frijns’s rear gunner as the #20 car ran out the winner.  

Rast was again an early pitter at the Sao Paulo 6 Hours. It didn’t work out for #20 this time, but it allowed the car to assume the defensive role that #15 had played at Spa: for the better part of three hours the fastest car on the track was bottled up behind Sheldon van der Linde and then Frijns. The #12 Jota Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh driven by Will Stevens and Norman Nato was unable to exploit a clear performance advantage and ended up third at the end.

This was a race that Cadillac should at the very least have won, if not repeated its 1-2 of last year. It locked out the front row — Stevens taking the first pole for a Caddy not claimed by the absent Alex Lynn — and ran first and third to the first round of stops. At which point it all went wrong for the American manufacturer. 

Bamber, sharing #38 with Sebastien Bourdais and Jack Aitken, managed to miss his pit stall, the car having to be manoeuvred back into place. A lap later, Stevens saw his four-second lead disappear and then some as a result of an issue with the right-front wheelnut. The time loss was significant for both cars, 15 or so seconds. 

As big a blow as it was, Cadillac could still have won on the 2.68-mile Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace. Or at least the #12 might well have done so. Half an hour after stopping, Stevens was up into fourth and right on the tail of the #20 in third place. Stevens made light work of the Bimmer, easing past into the first corner. 

Cadillac could have repeated its triumph in Brazil from 12 months ago but were let down by errors and pitstop delays

Photo by: JEP

Fast forward to the next stint, and Nato resumed with a handy margin over van der Linde, only to spin at Turn 8 when AF Corse Ferrari driver Phil Hanson made an around the outside move for position. The time loss for Nato was negligible, but crucially he lost position to the out-of-sequence BMW.

It was the turning point of the race courtesy of a car that but for its early pitstop would have been loitering way down the order. The Frenchman would remain behind van der Linde for the remainder of his double stint, the Caddy nailed to the Bimmer’s gearbox for the majority of the way. Any chance Nato had of jumping the South African in the pits at his next pit call was removed by a five-second stop and hold for tagging an LMGT3 car. 

Only after the final stops did the Caddy, now with Stevens back at the wheel, make it ahead. By then it was too late for Jota. Any chance of victory had as good as disappeared and the British team had to make do with the final spot on the podium. The gap to the BMW looked close at 6.6s, but in the context of Sunday’s race it was an eternity. A total of 11 cars finished on the lead lap at Interlagos, which was all the more remarkable given that the only interruption over the duration was a single Full Course Yellow. 

“We can’t help but feel disappointed as we had the car and the pace with both cars to get another 1-2 here” Norman Nato

The #38 Jota Caddy ended up fourth. Bamber wasn’t able to follow Stevens up the order after their early pitlane woes, though the car did creep its way towards the front. By the end of the race Aitken was right with Stevens — and briefly allowed past to try to exert some pressure on the cars ahead — but a five-second time penalty for causing a collision meant the car was always going to finish behind #12. 

“We can’t help but feel disappointed as we had the car and the pace with both cars to get another 1-2 here,” said Nato. “Unfortunately the time loss in the pitstop and small penalty for contact with another car meant the result didn’t go our way.”

The Caddy was the fastest thing around Interlagos last weekend. Stevens and Nato had a tenth on their team-mates, though the former was the easily the quicker of the two drivers in #12. The winning BMW probably wasn’t even the third-fastest car on Sunday, but then the car it beat to victory certainly wasn’t the fourth. 

Pace ultimately denied the #51 Ferrari from seriously contest the win

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

Magnussen, van der Linde and Vanthoor prevailed over the #51 Ferrari driven by Antonio Giovinazzi, Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado by 2.2s, though the gap had been just over double that a couple of laps before the chequered flag. The Ferrari had qualified only 11th in Giovinazzi’s hands and didn’t look like a contender early doors. The car, however, came alive in Pier Guidi’s control over the course of a triple stint in the middle portion of the race. So much so that Calado was able to get ahead of the winning BMW with two hours to run. It started with AF Corse bringing in Pier Guidi early, Calado using the nine laps he had on four fresh medium-compound Michelins — this was a race exclusively run on the medium – to eradicate the gap to BMW. 

Calado would almost certainly have been ahead after the BMW stopped had he not clipped the barriers on the downhill section of pitlane exit. He lost perhaps a couple of seconds and emerged with a strip of advertising hoarding lodged across the lefthand side of the nose. Remarkably, it had no effect on the performance of the car, nor its cooling. The falling temperatures as cloud descended on Interlagos helped, but also explained why he went off in the first place on unheated tyres. 

But Calado was close enough to put Vanthoor under pressure at Turn 8 on the BMW’s out-lap, the Belgian taking a trip across the grass on his cold rubber as he defended his position. The Ferrari, appendage and all, managed to gap Vanthoor by as much as four seconds at one point. But there was always going to be a payback when Calado stopped for the final time with a shade over an hour to go. He needed more fuel than the BMW and as a result dropped back behind. AF’s strategy had been worth a punt, but was ultimately unsuccessful. 

Vanthoor never came under pressure from Calado, though he reckoned he had to dig deep over his final double stint. He admitted to feeling unwell in the car. “I’ve never felt so bad driving a car, oh my god,” he said. “I tried so hard.”

The winning BMW ended up leading 90 of 242 laps of the race, a dozen fewer than a car that never looked likely to win. The #35 Signatech Alpine A424 LMDh shared Ferdinand Habsburg, Antonio Felix da Costa and Charles Milesi went off sequence on fuel in the opening hour of the race and repeatedly cycled through to the front when everyone else pitted. The team knew that it would need a slice of luck to win this one, given that the car was always going to have to make an extra stop. A conveniently-timed FCY never came and Habsburg and co could only finish 10th. 

That was a couple of places behind the #20 BMW. The four points won gave Rast and Frijns the championship lead (Van der Linde sits third after missing Spa). They are now tied on 75 points with the Le Mans-winning Toyota crew of Kamui Kobayashi, Nyck de Vries and Mike Conway, though top the classification on countback. More importantly for BMW, it now sits second in the manufacturers’ standings, just five points down on Toyota. 

Rast, van der Linde and Frijns certainly did a job for their employer in Brazil.

Rast and Frijns lead the WEC drivers' standings on countback

Photo by: JEP