How Ferrari profited from late Toyota pain in Austin

Ferrari looked to be in control of the Lone Star Le Mans round of the World Endurance Championship for the first two hours and ended up taking a first Hypercar victory of the season in Texas on Sunday. Yet this was no simple race — witness two full safety cars and three Full Course Yellows, track temperatures well above 40C and even a spot of rain — not for Ferrari nor anyone else. The 499P Le Mans Hypercar that led the way early doors trailed home out of the points and the one that ultimately triumphed needed a giant slice of good fortune at the death to claim the win. 

Miguel Molina, Nicklas Nielsen and Antonio Fuoco aboard the #50 Ferrari only won on Sunday because Toyota was hit by a heart-breaking failure with just 11 minutes of the six-hour race to go. A hydraulic problem first sent Nyck de Vries, one of the stars of the race at the Circuit of the Americas, off at Turn 11, then into the pits and then straight into the garage and retirement. Nielsen had only moved up to second a handful of laps beforehand and trailed the Japanese car by a shade under five seconds. The runner-up spot was as good as it was going to get for Ferrari had the #7 TR010 HYBRID LMH de Vries shared with Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi not been hit by a problem that affected both the powersteering and the gearshift, one that it had never previously encountered. 

The Ferrari Nielsen had qualified fifth, four tenths down on polesitter Antonio Giovinazzi in the #51 sister car, and had been put onto an off-kilter strategy early in the second hour. The car was short fuelled in the name of track position, a strategy that ended up paying no dividend. The fuel allocation had been cut across the board in Hypercar, which would have ruled out a five-stop race had it run green throughout its duration. The repeated neutralisations ensured that wasn’t the case. The straightforward strategy of de Vries and his team-mates was the correct one in Austin as it turned out. 

The AF Corse-run factory Ferrari that led the way initially started out on a similar strategy. Giovinazzi converted his pole into the lead when the race finally went green after the safety car was called in after two extra laps, the result of a quick shower in the lead-up to the race that left standing water on a couple of sections of the track. Giovinazzi was able to pull as much as five seconds on Jack Aitken in the Jota Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh which had qualified on the front row, the Brit matching the Ferrari’s time to the thousandth. The Italian, teamed with James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi as normal, was able to extend the gap to just over 20s before the second pit cycle just after the top of the second hour. 

It was at this point that it all went wrong for the #51 car. Calado jumped in, but was unable to restart the car as a result of what Ferrari revealed was a procedural error on the part of Giovinazzi as he entered pitlane. Half a minute was lost while the British driver recycled the systems. When he eventually got going, he was just outside the top 10. 

The two safety cars that followed might have given the dominant car of the opening stages a way back into contention, but the Ferrari lost something in terms of balance over the final two thirds of the race. With nothing much happening for the car and Calado struggling with the balance on the medium tyre, Ferrari opted to send Pier Guidi out on the hard tyre. Despite the high track temperatures, it probably wasn’t the right move: the majority of the Hypercar field ran on Michelin’s medium tyre for the majority of the time over the six hours. An early fifth stop in a further attempt to mix things up meant the car could only trail home 11th in the final classification. 

The #7 Toyota was cruelly denied victory due to a powersteering and the gearshift issue

Photo by: JEP

Ferrari wasn’t convinced that the #51 would have been able to beat the #7 Toyota had neither car encountered their problems. Giuliano Salvi, Ferrari’s test and race team manager, wasn’t sure about what he called the “what if” scenario, pointing out that the Japanese car “was better than us” over the final stages of the race. “But here track position is so crucial; if you are leading you can manage things in a different way,” he continued. “When you fall behind, because the cars are so sensitive in the slipstream, it is difficult to manage the tyres.”

Toyota was more sure that in this hypothetical scenario, it would have come out on top. Toyota Racing technical director David Floury pointed out that the advantage established by Giovinazzi would have been wiped out by the first safety car anyway. “I don’t think they would have won,” he stated quite bluntly. 

But Ferrari did win courtesy of Toyota’s last-gasp misfortune, though another manufacturer left the track on Sunday evening with a sense of regret. Alpine took third and fifth with its pair of A424 LMDhs run by Signatech on a day that it had a car that was a match for the Toyota. On a 50-lap average, the #35 A424 shared by Ferdinand Habsburg, Charles Milesi and Antonio Felix da Costa was a couple of hundredths up on the #7 GR010. 

"For a championship, you need everything perfect and today we had a problem with #8 that led to a drive-through and a problem with #7 that retired the car. So we cannot be happy" David Floury

Milesi was running second to de Vries in the closing stages when a ball of tyre debris got under his car and sent him wide at Turn 6. As he got bundled up in LMGT3 traffic, Nielsen in the winning Ferrari was able to sneak past. It mattered not as it turned out, because the French car was docked five seconds in the final result for an unsafe release at its final pitstop, dropping it from second to third. 

The sister car, the #36 driven by Frederic Makowiecki Jules Gounon and Victor Martins, had been the higher placed of the two Alpines as the end of the penultimate hour approached. Its hopes of victory were dashed when Martins stopped just before the Virtual Safety Car that led into second full caution of the race. The time loss to those who made their full stops under the VSC gave it no way back. 

The importance of track position on Sunday was no better illustrated than the fortunes of the #38 Jota Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh. Aitken, Sebastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber ended up second after the Alpine’s penalty, but they were potential winners of this race. Bamber wasn’t given fresh tyres at the first VSC — the team was worried about using up too much of its allocation so early in the race — but somehow managed to hang on in the lead for more than a dozen laps before losing out to the #7 Toyota. 

Alpine could have profited more from Toyota's misfortune

Photo by: FIA WEC / DPPI

The problems came for the Caddy at the next round of stops when it needed four new tyres and plummeted down the order. Aitken resumed down in 10th place, so it was always going to be a long slog home. But for the Toyota’s retirement and the penalty for the Alpine, Jota wouldn’t even have collected any silverware. 

Toyota left the track with just eight points for sixth place for the #8 car shared by Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa. It was on the same strategy as the winning Ferrari, but a penalty for pitlane speeding in the penultimate hour — the reasons for which Toyota Racing declined to explain — did for its chances at a time that it was running ahead of the #50 Ferrari. The team then tried to mix it up on strategy, bringing the car in for what should have been its penultimate pitstop early. The VSC and safety car that followed meant nothing good came of this strategy call. 

It was of little solace to Toyota, reckoned Floury, that it actually extended its lead at the top of the Hypercar manufacturers’ classification on a day that nearest rival BMW came away with nothing better than an eighth-place finish for the best of its WRT M Hybrid V8 LMDhs. 

“For a championship, you need everything perfect and today we had a problem with #8 that led to a drive-through and a problem with #7 that retired the car,” he said. “So we cannot be happy: to fight for the championship you need to take points.”

Toyota still extended its leads the WEC manufacturers' championship despite a tough Lone Star Le Mans

Photo by: James Moy Photography via Getty Images