How Cadillac triumphed in the WEC Monza 6 Hours without the fastest car

When Sebastien Bourdais jumped aboard the #38 Jota Cadillac V-Series.R at the Monza 6 Hours just over two-thirds of the way through, he only had one job to do. And that was to stay ahead of the chasing #36 Alpine A424 with Victor Martins at the wheel. The task ahead of him wasn’t easy, not least because he would be undertaking his first dry laps of the weekend and Martins had already been at the wheel of the French car for a stint. But Bourdais, in his last race with Cadillac, managed to just stay ahead throughout the stint and a half. The performance set the #38 Caddy he shared with Jack Aitken and Earl Bamber on course for the US manufacturer’s first World Endurance Championship victory of the season.

This was a race, as is so often the case at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza, that was all about track position. Caddy didn’t have the fastest car around the 3.6-mile ‘Temple of Speed’ last weekend, but it did sit atop the order for what might be described as an unrepresentative 181 of the 191 laps. That was because the Alpine that Martins shared with Jules Gounon had the slightest of edges on pace. Caddy took the victory and Jota maintained its record of scoring at least one win - either overall or in LMP2 - since joining the WEC full time in 2016 not on speed but execution.

“They were definitely faster; they were extremely strong,” reckoned Bourdais. “Being in clean air was everything, and they spent a lot of time in our dirty air. We did it today with very fine margins, in- and out-laps, pitstops, the three of us drivers, everything. Credit to the team because everyone really had to execute.”

A racy Aitken got the car up to second from the second row at the start and then took the lead from Daniel Juncadella in the #19 Genesis GMR-001 Hypercar on the run into the Parabolica on lap seven. The race turned into a Caddy versus Alpine LMDh battle once Aitken got out of the car and handed over to Bourdais during the third virtual safety car of the race. The gap between #38 and #36 was never much more than a smattering of seconds for the remaining four hours as Bourdais and Bamber completed the job started by the Briton who had to rush home for the impending birth of his first child.

Bourdais never had more than a second over Martins, though his lead did extend ever so slightly once Sheldon van der Linde in the #20 WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 LMDh nipped past Martins just before the next round of stops. Had Martins been able to pass in those crucial opening laps of Bourdais’s stint, the likelihood was that Alpine would have bowed out of the WEC with a victory.

“It was tricky because I didn’t turn a single lap in the dry,” said Bourdais, who took the controls for the reconnaissance lap to at least get some familiarity with the car in the dry after the trio of free practice sessions had all been wet but for the final minutes of FP2 on Friday. “When you jump in the car with old tyres and a driver behind you who had been in the car for a stint, it’s gonna be a little sporty for the first few laps. There was no room for error; it didn’t allow me to try anything in terms of lines or taking the kerbs. I basically took Jack’s lines and braking points: I was watching his onboard a lot, which is something I usually don’t do. I knew if I hit a kerb the wrong way, the lead would be gone.”

Track position proved vital in the fight for victory between Cadillac and Alpine

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

Martins fully agreed that this was the crunch time of the race. “I heard Seb say that if I had got ahead of him, it would have been over for them,” said the Alpine driver. “I really think that was the case; the one who was ahead at that point of the race was in a good position.”

Bourdais ended up doing only a short double; the fourth and final safety car of the race, preceded as normal by a VSC, meant Jota swapped him out for Bamber. Martins got back to second shortly after the race went green, and it was Caddy against Alpine for the rest of the way. Bamber edged away, but Martins was able to go a lap longer on his penultimate stint. With the Caddy driver required to save fuel over the final 45 or so minutes, the Alpine came back, a deficit of 7s being reduced to just under two in short order. But once Bamber had got his fuel numbers under control, combined with a bit of traffic for Martins, he was able to re-establish some breathing space and take the victory by 5.6s.

“We were a bit surprised the Alpine went that extra lap in the middle,” explained Bamber. “We managed to get back on the numbers and free up some fuel. Otherwise they would have got on the back of us and it would have been tough.”

Martins spent nearly four and a half hours behind the wheel of #36 after taking over Gounon. He admitted that he was tired at the end, but there was a bigger problem: "What disturbed me the most was how much I wanted to go to the toilet"

The top two completed three stints on a single set of Michelin soft-compound slicks: tyre degradation was minimal on the ‘new’ Monza track surface laid in 2024. Martins had just over 10s on the #51 AF Corse Ferrari 499P LMH with Antonio Giovinazzi at the wheel when he stopped for the last time. That meant he would have been able to change at least two tyres, possibly even four, and stay ahead and then chase the Caddy on fresh rubber. Martins wasn’t sure that would have been the correct tactic. “I would have lost on warm-up and I am not sure I would have recovered that time because there wasn’t so much drop in the tyres,” he explained. “We knew that by pitting one lap after them, we were going to have lift a lot less and be able to close the gap. So we gambled on this.”

Martins spent nearly four and a half hours behind the wheel of #36 after taking over Gounon. He admitted that he was tired at the end, but there was a bigger problem: “What disturbed me the most was how much I wanted to go to the toilet. In the end I had to stop drinking.”

Ferrari took third position with the factory 499P that Giovinazzi shared with James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi, albeit half a minute down on the Alpine. It wasn’t so far away from the Alpine and the Caddy in terms of pace - not even a tenth on a 100-lap average — and Giuliano Salvi, the test and race team manager, insisted the Prancing Horse could have won on home ground. “In terms of pure performance there was nothing we were missing,” he explained. “With the right strategy and more running in free air we could have been fighting with Cadillac and Alpine, and then it would have been a matter of details.” Its cause wasn’t helped by its other two cars, the #50 car in which Antonio Fuoco had claimed pole and the #83 satellite entry, both being penalised 20s early doors when their tyre pressures fell below the mandated minimum.

Ferrari completed the podium after Aston Martin's double penalty dropped it out of the points entirely

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey

The 499P only made it onto the podium after Aston Martin had a first piece of WEC silverware wrenched from its grasp. Tom Gamble crossed the line in third in the #007 Valkyrie LMH he shared with Harry Tincknell after storming up from seventh over the final 40 minutes, only for the car to receive two penalties. It was first docked 20s for a tyre pressure infringement, dropping the car to fourth, and then a further 145s because the car finished the race on a minus 1% energy. That dropped it all the way out of the points to 12th.

“Gutted” was how Gamble summed up the situation after the latest of Aston and The Heart of Racing Team’s series of near-misses in their pursuit of that elusive podium. “Our strategy appeared to come good and it felt like I had a tyre advantage at the end,” said the Briton, who was on a double rather than the triple of the majority of the cars he overtook. “The car felt really good and I thought P4 was possible, and then went I got that I pushed on for the podium.”

What made it doubly galling for Aston was that the race finished with the track strewn with debris and the #12 Jota Caddy in the barriers on the exit of the Roggia chicane after Alex Lynn and Malthe Jakobsen in the #94 Peugeot 9X8 had a coming together as they battled over what was then fifth. “It was crazy that there wasn’t at least a Full Course Yellow,” said Gamble. “If that had happened we would have been okay on the fuel.”

BMW looked a genuine contender with the #20 M Hybrid van der Linde shared with Rene Rast and Robin Frijns in the middle stages of the race, but a technical issue, hybrid-related, caused the last-named all sorts of problems over the final couple of hours. Three offs left the car seventh at the finish. That was two places behind the sister #15 Bimmer of Kevin Magnussen, Raffaello Marciello and Dries Vanthoor, which enough to secure Magnussen and Marciello third in the drivers’ points. BMW also sealed the runner-up spot to Toyota in the manufacturers’ classification.

The Japanese manufacturer had wrapped up the makes title last time out in Barcelona in October, while its 1-2 finish in Spain meant the drivers’ crown was destined for one of its two crews. Yet it was only doing to be disputed if the Toyota TR010 HYBRID LMH was a competitive proposition in Italy given that Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa in #8 arrived with a 17-point advantage over team-mates Kamui Kobayashi, Nyck de Vries and Mike Conway: Toyota needed to be competing at the sharp end for there to be any kind of championship jeopardy. It was nowhere at Monza, the two cars trailing home 11th and 12th on the road.

But then Toyota knew that the battle was as good over when it got the Balance of Performance numbers in the run-up to the race. “It’s a bit sad to finish the season like this,” reckoned Toyota Racing technical director David Floury. “I prefer to look back on the season and be happy for every team member.”

Toyota collected all the big honours in the WEC, the two end-of-season titles and the Le Mans 24 Hours crown, because it executed better than its rivals, quite often when it didn’t have the fastest car. Which is exactly what Jota and Cadillac did at Monza on Sunday.