How Ferrari rode its luck to beat Toyota for Austin WEC spoils

Finally! Ferrari’s 499P Le Mans Hypercar, already a two-time victor at the Le Mans 24 Hours, notched up a belated first win in a regular World Endurance Championship race at Austin last Sunday, fittingly within hours of the Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 squad’s triumph on home ground at Monza. But it didn’t do it with the factory team, it should be pointed out, or on a day that it had the fastest car. 

The AF Corse-run privateer 499P shared by Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Robert Shwartzman took the narrowest of victories after six hours of racing around the 3.43-mile Circuit of The Americas thanks to a significant slice of luck.

The yellow Ferrari had led the majority of the way over the first two thirds of the race but, come the crunch hours at the end, it appeared to have been bested by the #7 Toyota GR010 HYBRID driven by Mike Conway, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi. The Japanese car had the edge over the final stages of the Lone Star Le Mans event, only to lose victory to a penalty taken with 40 minutes left. 

Kobayashi was adjudged to have failed to slow sufficiently under waved yellow flags and was handed a drive-through. He had been 10s up the road from Shwartzman when he dived into the pits, and emerged 9s in arrears. Such was the pace advantage of the Toyota in this crucial stage of the race that he was able to close the gap to just 1.8s by the time the flag fell.

The result still might have been different but for a Full Course Yellow, the third of the race, that interrupted his chase. It deprived Kobayashi of a couple of laps in which to catch the Ferrari while the field trundled around the sweeps and swoops of COTA at 80km/h (50mph). 

Ferrari knew it needed some good fortune for the 499P to finally notch up a victory away from the hallowed asphalt of the Circuit de la Sarthe, the luck of which it was deprived at May’s restarted Spa WEC round and most certainly didn’t need when it hit the strategic self-destruct button when the rain came at Imola the previous month. 

“We were lucky because of the infringement under the double yellows,” said Ferdinando Cannizzo, Ferrari’s sportscar racing technical director. “Without the penalty, Toyota would have finished in front. They were the fastest car on track today.”

Ye, Shwartzman and Kubica celebrated the first victory for Ferrari in a regular WEC round since its arrival into the top Hypercar class last year

Photo by: Ferrari

For the crew of the 499P which Ferrari calls a customer car but would probably better be described as a satellite entry, victory last weekend represented atonement for its failure at Le Mans in June. It led a chunk of the French enduro and was very much in the hunt, even with the penalty Kubica received for his controversial clash with BMW driver Dries Vanthoor, when it retired with a hybrid issue late in the 20th hour.

“I think we can call it redemption for Le Mans,” said Shwartzman, repeating a word also used by Kubica. “That was a big loss for us; it hurt a lot. We were hungry for that win and finally we got it here.”

Kubica had moved into the lead during the opening hour after maintaining his second-place qualifying position to pole-winner Antonio Giovinazzi in the best of the factory 499Ps run by AF. Minimum tyre pressures are declared before each WEC round and the Polish driver was having problems maintaining them. The solution? To go faster!

"If you had told me this morning that we would have been second, I would have signed for it,. We got quicker as the track rubbered in and we had good tyre management, but today we couldn’t fight on track" 
David Floury

So Ferrari ordered the leader to move over so that the driver of the erstwhile second-place car could step up the pace. The tyre issue did have a knock-on for Kubica. As a result of the pressure problem he was given a full set of new tyres at the first round of pitstops while his pursuers in the red cars, Giovinazzi in #51 and Miguel Molina in #50, had fresh rubber only on the left side. The customer car held onto the lead, though, because Giovinazzi had to take a 5s penalty for contact with an LMGT3 Lexus, an impact that would come back to haunt him. 

The tyre strategies between the customer Ferrari and the solo factory car remaining – #51 was out of the race by the two-hour mark – diverged over the race. Ye was sent out on the hard Michelin tyre, while Nicklas Nielsen (in for Molina) was given three mediums and one hard on the stressed left-rear corner. The yellow car needed to do a full double stint to stretch its 18-tyre race allocation through the six hours, and putting on the hards was a way to achieve that.

Ye knew a double on the hards wasn’t going to make his life easy: “It wasn’t the quickest way,” said the Chinese driver. But he managed to hold off de Vries to the end of the stint. But not for the first time in the race, Toyota opted to bring its car in early in an attempt to make the pass during the pitstop cycle.

The tactic worked: Kobayashi got the undercut after being strapped in for the final two hours. Once past, he took off and built the lead to 10s. Just as at Spa, it looked like Toyota had stolen this one from under Ferrari’s nose. 

Toyota did not anticipate its strong run to second that so nearly culminated in victory

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Toyota came into this race in pessimistic mood. It insisted that it hadn’t been quick in a test at Austin attended by all the Hypercar manufacturers bar Alpine at the back end of July, and then it received a double Balance of Performance hit – less power and more weight – for Austin.

That Kobayashi could only put his GR010 ninth on the grid in the Hyperpole session for the fastest 10 cars in first qualifying and Sebastien Buemi qualified 12th didn’t help the mood in the camp. Given its aspirations before the start, there wasn’t so much disappointment at Toyota post-race.

“If you had told me [in the] morning that we would have been second, I would have signed for it,” said Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director David Floury. “We got quicker as the track rubbered in and we had good tyre management [#7 only ran on the medium], but we couldn’t fight on track. We saw that with Nyck: he couldn’t overtake the Ferrari even though it was on two-stint-old tyres. We were stuck behind them for half a stint.”

But there was a little bit of anger at Toyota. It insisted that it had been treated unfairly by race control when it came to Kobayashi’s penalty. Floury suggested that Shwartzman in the winning Ferrari had actually been a tenth faster than Kobayashi over the portion of track – the majority of the length of the back straight – covered by the waved yellows on the lap in question.

It was a mixed race for Toyota and the factory Ferrari squad. Molina, Nielsen and Antonio Fuoco came home third on a day when they couldn’t match the pace of the other two 499Ps. The pole-winning machine Giovinazzi shared with James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi (or would have done had the car got that far) went out early. 

Giovinazzi had spun while attempting to lap the delayed Peugeot 9X8 2024 LMH with Paul di Resta at the wheel and then struggled to get the car going. When he did, he could only trail slowly around to the pits.

The Ferrari was pretty much instantly retired with what was described as a driveline issue. The root of the problem was not the spin but the earlier clash with the Lexus for which Giovinazzi had been deemed culpable. The contact damaged a rear rim, which set up a vibration that did for the car. 

The #51 entry was the quicker of the two factory Ferraris while it was running. The Le Mans winners in #50 didn’t look the same force on Sunday, at least for the first half of the race. The majority of the 26s by which Fuoco trailed the winning 499P at the finish was lost in the opening three hours.

The Le Mans-winning #50 Ferrari crew of Fuoco, Molina and Nielsen couldn't match the satellite #83 squad

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

There was also only one Toyota in the fight at Austin. Life was always going to be difficult for Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Buemi after the last-named missed out on a spot in Hyperpole, though the car had made progress up the leaderboard. It was in the top six in the final hour when Buemi, on his out-lap after getting back behind the wheel, moved acutely across to defend his position from Kevin Estre in the best of the Penske Porsche 963 LMDhs on the back straight.

Contact was made, yet Buemi kept moving to his left. A second contact followed as the Porsche driver attempted to complete the pass with all four wheels on the track apron. The Toyota sustained bodywork damage and a left-rear puncture and also attracted the ire of the stewards. The Swiss was handed a 30s penalty and a couple of points on his licence.

There was no defence of Buemi’s manoeuvre and he wisely apologised for his actions after the race, though his remorse seemed to be directed more towards the team rather than Estre.

Estre’s prediction that a top five was possible appeared on the money as the race drew to a close. But although he escaped from the clash with Buemi without damage, Estre was pinged for the same yellow-flag offence as Kobayashi

“I would like to apologise to the team for the contact I had with the Porsche,” he said. “It was my fault and I’m sorry for that because obviously that effectively ended our race.”

The car ended up 15th and the last Hypercar finisher after Buemi received a further penalty for ignoring blue flags. 

Porsche most definitely wasn’t happy with Buemi’s actions. Porsche Penske Motorsport managing director Jonathan Diuguid described them “as extremely dangerous” and suggested that race control “took the appropriate action”. 

It was a difficult day at the office for Porsche at Austin. The two Porsche Penske Motorsport 963s ended up sixth and seventh, the championship-leading entry Estre shared with Laurens Vanthoor and Andre Lotterer heading home the sister car driven by Frederic Makowiecki, Michael Christensen and Matt Campbell. 

The Porsche was another car that made dramatic progress over the race after a disappointing qualifying: Estre conceded that he failed to put a lap together with what he described as a difficult car in the first qualifying session on the way to 14th. It was a more competitive proposition in the race, and PPM mixed it up on strategy to hoick #6 up the order.

Estre survived contact from Buemi, but then was penalised himself and lost fifth place to Alpine

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Estre’s prediction that a top five was possible appeared on the money as the race drew to a close. But although he escaped from the clash with Buemi without damage, Estre was pinged for the same yellow-flag offence as Kobayashi. The drive-through dropped the car from fifth to sixth, still enough for its crew to maintain their championship lead with two races to go.

The two PPM cars were separated by just 4.6s at the finish, but the #5 963 should have been higher up the order – another operational gaffe by PPM lost the car more than 40s at the start. The safety cone in the pitot tube that measures airflow was left in place, which partially blocked the engine air intake and left the Penske team with no choice but to pit the car at the end of lap one. 

Campbell and co probably wouldn’t have made it onto the podium on a day that Porsche didn’t have the pace to run at or near the sharp end for the first time this year. It would also have been tough for the car to finish fourth, a position that went to the solo Ganassi-run Cadillac V-Series.R shared by Earl Bamber and Alex Lynn.

They reckoned the car was the best it had been all season, but it wasn’t quite good enough to challenge Ferrari and Toyota when push came to shove at the end of the race. Its rivals picked up some pace as the rubber went down, something the Caddy failed to do. 

The beneficiary of the Porsche penalty was Alpine, which collected fifth position with the A424 LMDh shared by Ferdinand Habsburg, Charles Milesi and Paul-Loup Chatin, easily the car’s best result to date in its debut season. It followed the car’s fourth-place qualifying position, another season’s best, the day before. 

In between times, it wasn’t plain sailing for the #35 car. Habsburg was penalised after locking up at the end of the back straight on lap one and tagging Bamber. The French car did show impressive pace thereafter, however. Milesi ended up with second fastest race lap, just two hundredths behind the mark set by the flying Kobayashi. 

There was a bit of luck involved in Alpine’s result, the Porsche penalty and two for the #20 WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 included. But the Renault brand is clearly on an upward trajectory in WEC even if it isn’t in F1. The second car, driven by Mick Schumacher, Nicolas Lapierre and Matthieu Vaxiviere, also made it home in the points in ninth, one place behind the #15 BMW.

The Jota Porsche shared by Jenson Button, Oliver Rasmussen and Phil Hanson ended up 10th, though was running between the two factory cars when the first-named had to stop with a puncture late in the final hour. The sister car retired after the team gave up trying to fix a problem that resulted in the car cutting out when it became clear that it wouldn’t reach the 70% distance required for a classified finish.

Best showing to date from Alpine netted fifth place for Habsburg, Milesi and Chatin

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

BMW makes progress – and mistakes

BMW posted its most competitive display yet in Hypercar with the M Hybrid V8 LMDh at Austin. Yet the factory WRT team failed to improve on its best result of the season, sixth at Imola in April. The Lone Star Le Mans weekend was, reckoned BMW M Motorsport boss Andreas Roos, “a mixture of positives and negatives”.

The big positive was that the BMW was able to race with a Ferrari – if not the Ferrari – and the Cadillac. Ongoing improvement over the course of BMW’s first season in the WEC, a fast and flowing circuit layout favoured by the M Hybrid, and a bit of help from the Balance of Performance contributed to the upturn in fortunes. 

The negative was that BMW missed out on bettering its Imola result courtesy of two mistakes late on in the race. Fifth looked on for the #20 car shared by Rene Rast, Robin Frijns and Sheldon van der Linde until a drive-through in the penultimate hour for a Full Course Yellow infringement.

"It is too early to say that we have turned a corner"
Andreas Roos

The car was still headed for sixth in the final hour when the team pitted it a lap too late at its final fuel stop, resulting in an overshoot of its energy allocation. The result was a 100-second stop-and-hold that relegated the car to 13th. 

BMW did make it into the points, with the sister #15 car shared by Marco Wittmann, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor taking eighth. The first-named had run ahead of Rast initially, though subsequently lost time with a spin in the second hour. 

“We have clearly done some steps,” said Roos. “The pace was good, especially in the long runs. We were able to fight with the #50 Ferrari and the Cadillac, so I wouldn’t want to say that a podium was not within reach. Everything between P3 and P5 was possible today. But in the end we made too many mistakes.”

As to whether BMW had made some kind of breakthrough with the M Hybrid, Roos wouldn’t be drawn.

“We were quick from the first free practice, but then we tested here,” he explained. “Fuji might not be the best circuit for us and we won’t test, so we will have no reference. It is too early to say that we have turned a corner, but I hope that the first podium can come soon.”

Two penalties for the #20 crew cost BMW its best result in the WEC yet

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images