How Ferrari’s threat is growing against Toyota approaching Le Mans

A third Toyota victory in three races and a second 1-2 suggested it was business as usual for the 2023 World Endurance Championship at Spa last weekend. That wasn’t quite the case in the final race before the Le Mans 24 Hours. The Japanese manufacturer admitted that it “didn’t have fantastic pace” on a day that its Italian rival showed real evidence that it will be a threat come the big one in next month. 

Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez took the win aboard the #7 GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar and on the face of it appeared to have continued Toyota’s domination after the rulemakers opted against taking the opportunity to tweak the Balance of Performance. They led 132 of the 148 laps of an incident-packed event that started on a damp track and included four safety cars and three Full Course Yellows. But over the full duration of the Spa 6 Hours the Ferrari 499P was the quicker car on average even if the best of its LMHs could only finish third behind the second Toyota driven by Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa.

That can partly be explained by the fact that the #51 car shared by Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi was in catch-up mode for more than five of the six hours. It came back from a series of delays to snatch a third consecutive podium for Ferrari, Calado sealing #51’s first silverware on the final lap when he breezed around the outside of Frederic Makowiecki’s Porsche at Les Combes.

Calado and his team-mates came from a lap down to take third position just over a minute behind the winning Toyota. The #51 car lost time with two emergency pitstops when the pits were closed — one for a deflating tyre caused by a damaged rim in the third hour, one to take a five-second dump of fuel in the fifth — but the biggest loss came early in the race. A safety-first decision to start on wet-weather Michelins, rather than on slicks like Toyota, and then the struggle that followed as Giovinazzi and Nicklas Nielsen in the sister car strived to bring their tyres up to temperature on a still-damp track dropped the Ferraris off the lead lap in little more than an hour.

Ferrari had set its cars up for the second half of the race: the weather forecast suggested there was going to be no more rain. And Calado flew over his double stint and closed down the better part of a minute on the Porsche 963 LMDh Makowiecki shared with Michael Christensen and Dane Cameron over the final 50 minutes. The Ferrari was on the medium tyre, the hardest of the compounds available after Michelin successfully applied to bring three rather than two specifications of slick to Spa in light of an uncertain weather forecast. The Porsche driver was on softs, and ailing in the final laps.

Ferrari's pace threatened Toyota even if strategy calls and track incidents didn't fall its way

Photo by: Paul Foster

“I kept asking for the gap, just to keep me awake,” said Calado. “I was like, OK I’m going to push and hope for the best. They told me I’d catch him on the last lap, but I needed to keep that pace. I risked quite a lot.”

The big question post-race was whether Ferrari could have won this race without its delays. After all, both the podium-finishing car and the sister entry had been able to get their lap back in the middle of the race, admittedly when Lopez was struggling at the end of a double stint. 

Calado wasn’t entirely sure: “The positive thing as well as the podium was that we were a lot closer to the pace of the Toyota. Without all the little things that went wrong, maybe we could have given them a fight.” 

The sister car was ahead of #51 and running third early in the fifth hour of the race when Antonio Fuoco lost it on the front straight after exiting the pits. It wasn’t the first incident of the weekend to bring the ban on tyre warmers for this year into sharp focus. 

"Spa is always Spa and you cannot underestimate the changeable conditions. It was a choice based on the [weather] predictions we had and I don’t think it changed the result" Giuliano Salvi

The decision to start on wets didn’t prevent the 499P taking a maiden WEC win, according to Ferrari race and testing manager Giuliano Salvi. “In hindsight you can say Spa is always Spa and you cannot underestimate the changeable conditions,” he said. “It was a choice based on the [weather] predictions we had and I don’t think it changed the result massively.”

The safety cars allowed the Ferraris to make up lost ground after they got back on the lead lap in hour three, but Salvi reckoned they were a hinderance, too. He suggested that they didn’t come at the right time for the team’s tyre strategy. “Quite painful for us,” was how he described them. 

Toyota thought its decision to start on slicks was decisive. “The race has been decided in this early phase,” said Toyota Gazoo Racing technical director Pascal Vasselon, who then went on to make the comment about the GR010s not having “fantastic pace”.

A crash in qualifying but the #8 Toyota at a serious disadvantage

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The #7 car was always favourite to come out in an internecine Toyota battle. Hartley had crashed #8 on his out-lap at the top of Eau Rouge in qualifying, a double whammy for him and his team-mates. Not only did it mean the car started from the penultimate row of the grid but the drivers of #8 had to get through the six hours with a reduced tyre allocation. Series rules limit each Hypercar to 18 tyres for qualifying and the race. At least two of the Michelins on which Hartley had attempted to qualify were flat-spotted beyond use, while the team thought it might be able to press the other two into service. It intended to see if they were fit for purpose on the reconnaissance laps but, with the track wet, Toyota decided to press on with just three and half sets.

That meant at the end of the race when the two Toyotas were neck and neck after the final pitstop, Hartley had nothing for Kobayashi. The #8 car stopped a lap later and got out of the pits ahead but lost a short-lived lead when the Japanese driver swept around the outside, all four wheels off the track, at the top of Eau Rouge as Hartley brought the two fresh tyres he had on the left side of the car up to temperature.

Hartley had got ahead because there were only two fresh tyres left to go on the car, whereas Kobayashi got four new Michelins. But he knew keeping the lead was a forlorn hope: “Kamui had new tyres at the end, so I was never going to challenge.”

Kobayashi was penalised for his move. He was given a five-second penalty while he was on his final lap, the addition reducing his winning margin from 17s to 12s in the final results. Toyota successfully argued that the Japanese driver shouldn’t be given a drive-through, the more normal penalty for a track-limits infraction. 

“Brendon was being very careful, which we can understand after yesterday,” said Vasselon. “We immediately told race control that and there was no issue.”

Vasselon suggested that had Hartley been able to stay ahead Toyota would have swapped the positions “because #8 was slower”. Toyota traditionally calls off any fight between its two cars at the final pitstops, though it has modified those protocols slightly this year in light of the ban of tyre heaters. For how many corners Hartley would have had to stay ahead before Kobayashi was told to hold position isn’t clear. 

Hartley admitted that it would have been tough to beat the winning car, even in a straight fight. “We went in different directions on set-up and it looks like they did a slightly better job,” he explained. “If you’d asked me before the race if I would be happy with second, I’d have said, ‘Absolutely’.”

The two Toyotas were evenly matched even with the #8's tyre disadvantage

Photo by: Eric Le Galliot

The big challenge for the Toyotas was hanging on the wet track at the start. Conway, who started #7, described it as a “matter of survival”, though he was sure that slicks was the right call. “Pascal lives 10 minutes up the road, so knows all about the weather here,” he said. “I was happy with the decision and pretty sure it was the right one.”

“Once I’d got the settings sorted by playing with the traction control and things like that and the track started to dry a little bit, the tyres suddenly switched on," added Conway, who started on the pole claimed by Kobayashi after Giovinazzi had lost his fastest lap to a track-limits infraction. “Suddenly the car was in the window and it was just about being patient and picking off the guys ahead when we could.”

Conway had dropped to seventh on the opening racing lap, but was back at the front by the end of lap nine, three laps after a quick-fire safety car. The only glitches for the race winners over the remainder of the race were a couple of slow pitstops, one in the middle of Lopez’s double when it was unclear if he had made it into the pits before an FCY had been called and then a problem with the jacks when Kobayashi took over. 

Cadillac was in the mix, too, and might have finally notched up a maiden WEC podium after just falling short at Sebring and Algarve. Both the Ganassi-run Cadillac Racing squad’s regular WEC entry and the additional car entered at Spa in preparation for Le Mans had a shot at a top three. 

"We tried something with the tyres and it didn’t work as well as hoped. We definitely felt that we missed the opportunity to get on the podium" Stephen Mitas

The extra car was running second and only 37s off the lead in Renger van der Zande’s hands when he crashed heavily at Eau Rouge. Ganassi was offering no explanation ahead of a proper review of the data and played down the suggestion from Sebastien Bourdais, who was teamed with van der Zande and Jack Aitken, that the power steering had failed. What was clear, however, was that the Dutch driver ran much more kerb at the bottom of the corner than the following Ferraris. 

Van der Zande was on the money when he said that the accident was “almost out of a movie scene”. As dramatic as it was, he climbed from the car unaided and bowed to the crowed. 

The sister car ended up fifth in the hands of Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Richard Westbrook. The last-named had a 5s margin over Calado after they both climbed aboard their respective mounts, but fell behind inside six laps and then dropped away from the charging Ferrari. 

“We tried something with the tyres and it didn’t work as well as hoped,” said Ganassi team manager Stephen Mitas. “We definitely felt that we missed the opportunity to get on the podium because we had two quick race cars today.”

The real story of Spa, however, was Ferrari’s performance on a track much closer to the performance profile of Le Mans. Roll on June.

Can Ferrari take the fight to Toyota at Le Mans?

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images