How never-say-die Toyota salvaged WEC manufacturers' glory in Bahrain

With 90 minutes to go in Bahrain, Toyota’s hopes of hanging onto its World Endurance Championship manufacturers’ crown looked all but gone. One of its GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercars was sitting hors de combat in the pits, and the other was down in 10th place.

Yet when the chequered flag fell at 22:00 last Saturday it had somehow taken the win it needed to yank the silverware out of Porsche’s grasp. That it did owed something to good fortune and two safety cars that shook up the order in the Bahrain 8 Hours, but also some long-game tactics and a win-or-bust performance at the end from Sebastien Buemi in the winning Toyota shared with Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa.

The Japanese marque’s chance of taking the drivers’ crown was over thanks to the retirement of the sister car of Mike Conway, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi, but Buemi came through to take a clear victory that gave it a sixth straight manufacturers’ title. 

Achieving that looked unlikely to everyone, the Toyota Gazoo Racing squad included, as the race drew to a close. Buemi admitted afterwards that he “thought we were done, thought we were out of it” as he sat down the order in the safety car queue.

Toyota is always strong on the Bahrain International Circuit’s low-grip and abrasive surface, unchanged since the day it was laid ahead of the 2004 season, and the GR010 looks after its tyres better than any other car in the Hypercar field, but Buemi’s downbeat assessment of his chances was based on his experience from earlier in the race. 

The Swiss had converted Hartley’s pole position – a third in a row for the Kiwi in Bahrain – into the lead of the race. He was a handful of seconds up the road when, after 18 minutes, he was punted into a spin at Turn 1 when Hiroshi Koizumi aboard one of TF Sport’s Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.Rs missed his braking. 

Buemi was punted into a spin by an errant Corvette in the opening hour which dropped him into traffic

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The #8 Toyota had started on the medium compound tyre. They worked when Buemi was out front in clear air, but when he was down in the gaggle he was in trouble on the softer of the two Michelins available, a tyre on which only a handful of cars started the race.

The erstwhile leader dropped to seventh behind the two WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 LMDhs, passing Marco Wittmann quickly, but then getting bottled up behind Rene Rast. Only at the first round of pitstops did he jump the second Bimmer. 

“Those 20 laps behind the BMW really damaged the tyres, so I was thinking I might be able to pass two or three cars, not to overtake everyone and come through to the front,” said Buemi. “But I thought, f*** it and took a lot of risks – I was going to overtake or DNF.”

"We cut short the penultimate one so we got 25 and 25 laps, instead of extending the first one to 32 and doing only 19 on the second one. It meant we could maximise the tyres that we had" Sebastien Buemi

Buemi had fresh tyres for the run to the flag, and that he did owed much to the pain his team-mates endured during their stints. Hartley had continued on the medium – including two tyres from the car’s allocation used in qualifying – even though Toyota believed that the hard would have been the quicker option at this point.

But a change of strategy at this juncture would have left the car with fewer fresh tyres at the end. Hirakawa did go onto the hard, even though the temperatures were dropping in the early evening, and still struggled. “I think we’d done some stuff on set-up that didn’t really work with the hard,” reckoned Buemi. 

But pain taken, Buemi had six fresh tyres for the final double stint. Toyota brought him in early during this period to give him four new tyres.

“We decided to cut short the penultimate one so we got 25 and 25 laps, instead of extending the first one to 32 and doing only 19 on the second one,” added Buemi. “It meant we could maximise the tyres that we had.”

Toyota played its cards right by saving its tyres for the end of the race

Photo by: Andreas Beil

Buemi was up to fifth within a dozen laps of the restart and then jumped the #6 Porsche with Laurens Vanthoor at the wheel at the last round of pitstops. Now just a couple of seconds behind the other 963 LMDh, he moved past Matt Campbell to seal an against-the-odds victory four laps later. The Australian, sharing as usual with Michael Christensen and Frederic Makowiecki, had nothing for the Toyota and Buemi simply drove away. 

Campbell was clearly struggling with his tyres, and on the final lap would lose second to Antonio Giovinazzi aboard the #51 factory Ferrari 499P LMH. The Italian car, co-driven by James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi, was subsequently penalised for a tyre allocation infringement. That extended Buemi’s margin of victory from 27.5s to 29.2s.

A penalty of 4m55s awarded after the completion of the race dropped the 499P to an unrepresentative 14th. Ferrari had mistakenly put two Michelins on the car over the course of the race that were not part of its allocation: they were tyres to which it had made the reconnaissance laps on the way to the grid. The Italian manufacturer argued that no advantage was gained as a result. 

The battle for the manufacturers’ title was a winner-takes-all affair. It didn’t matter where Porsche, the points leader coming into the series finale, finished if Toyota won, courtesy of the extra points on offer for an eight-hour race compared with a regular six-hour WEC event. That was never going to make much difference in the fight for the drivers’ crown. Vanthoor, Kevin Estre and Andre Lotterer were 35 points to the good after their Fuji victory in September, with only 38 up for grabs on Saturday.

There was, however, some squeaky bum time for the Porsche crew on the opening lap and those that immediately followed. Estre had qualified a solid sixth, but Vanthoor was hit twice by Porsche’s closest challenger.

The double tag from Miguel Molina in the #50 Ferrari bundled him down to 15th, though the Italian car came off worse in the skirmish. It would require a new nose when the Spaniard pitted for the first time in the car he shared with Nicklas Nielsen and Antonio Fuoco. That put the Porsche trio’s big rival right to the back of the Hypercar field.

On the assumption that the Ferrari wasn’t going to win this one, Vanthoor and co only needed to finish 10th even if Kobayashi and de Vries took the victory with Conway. Vanthoor made no headway in his opening stint, but Porsche tightened its grip on the title as the race progressed, Estre moving the car into the points and then the top 10 in hour three, and the top six in hour four. 

The car even looked like a contender for victory late in the race, backing up Porsche Penske Motorsport’s pre-race claim that it wouldn’t be racing for points and wouldn’t be doing anything different to normal. But a total of three late penalties for Vanthoor when he got back in dropped the car down the order. One was for contact with an Alpine, one for a track limits violation while battling with brother Dries’s BMW, and one for speeding under a Full Course Yellow.

Lotterer, Vanthoor and Estre wrapped up the title despite an eventful race

Photo by: FIAWEC - DPPI

When the flag fell, Vanthoor was down in 11th, though it didn’t matter because the #50 Ferrari was behind him and the #7 Toyota that lay a couple of further points behind the Italian car coming into Bahrain was out of the race. It was irrelevant that the Porsche moved up into the points on the penalisation of the Ferrari. 

Yet it could have mattered because Kobayashi, de Vries and Conway, who wasn’t a title contender after missing the Le Mans 24 Hours through injury, were in the mix to win this one – before and after a problem with the fuel pump struck. Conway had the first knockings of the problem during his opening double stint, and then Kobayashi suddenly slowed after taking over the car. Pushing some buttons and turning some nobs got the car back up to speed but, when the issue returned as de Vries climbed aboard, Toyota opted to park the car. 

“We started to have power loss, intermittent at first and then more and more,” explained Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director David Floury. “It would have taken 15 minutes to change the pump. There was no point doing that and it was better to focus on the other car.”

Ferrari admitted afterwards that it didn’t get its strategy right in the final hours, but stressed that it probably wouldn’t have had anything for Toyota even if it had

So one of the cars that could have deprived Porsche of the drivers’ titles was out, and the other was never really in the game after Molina’s early moment. He struggled throughout his double stint at the start, first with the damaged nose and then the knock-on of that over the remainder of his stint after only taking new hard-compound Michelins on the right-hand side. 

The car came back after Nielsen got four fresh tyres, and was in the fight for a podium when the Dane was tagged by Charles Milesi in the #36 Alpine A424 LMDh at Turn 4. A slow lap back to the pits with a punctured left-rear left the car 11th. 

Yet Ferrari might have won this race, or probably would have won it but for the two late safety cars, the first early in hour seven when the #88 Proton Ford Mustang GT3 stopped on track with a flaming engine, and later in the same hour when the #94 Peugeot ground to a halt with a hybrid issue. Once the red safety light came on, race control had no choice but to throw the yellows. 

Giovinazzi had got into the lead after Buemi was sent across the asphalt run-off early on and the red car would lead the majority of the way. It sat at the front for 142 of the 235 racing laps in Bahrain, but crucially not the one that mattered. Ferrari admitted afterwards that it didn’t get its strategy right in the final hours, but stressed that it probably wouldn’t have had anything for Toyota even if it had. 

Ferrari led the majority of the race before its strategy choices left it to finish second on the road - then penalty demoted it to 14th

Photo by: Ferrari

The Ferrari had a lead of eight seconds before the first of the Virtual Safety Cars that these days in the WEC lead into the real thing. That was wiped out by the first caution, which was quickly followed by a second – there were only 10 green laps in between. 

Giovinazzi was at the head of the queue at the final safety car, the AF Corse-run factory team deciding to leave him out in the name of track position. Ferrari technical director Ferdinando Cannizzo admitted that with hindsight he would have pitted like the majority of the field. When the car did come in for its final stop, Giovinazzi got caught up in some pitlane traffic and lost something approaching 10s.

He resumed in 11th, which became fifth when the final pitstop cycle was complete. He had no problem clawing his way back up the order before snatching second on the final lap. Second became 14th in the small hours of Sunday morning when the Ferrari was deemed to have violated the tyre rules.

The other car that might have triumphed was the #12 Jota Porsche in which Spa winners Will Stevens and Callum Ilott were joined by Norman Nato, who was on Formula E duty that weekend. A tyre issue did for their chances, too, a puncture courtesy of contact with another car.

Ferrari’s penalty gave Peugeot its first podium of the season: the first with the revised version of its 9X8 LMH introduced at Imola back in April; and only the second, after Monza last year, since its return to the pinnacle of sportscar racing in mid-2022. It was a case of deja vu for the French manufacturer as Mikkel Jensen put in another storming finish to the race in the 9X8 2024 he shared with Jean-Eric Vergne and Nico Muller to improve on their fourth place at Fuji in September. The tactics were the same this time around, too, explained Peugeot Sport technical director Olivier Jansonnie.

“It was about not putting too many fresh tyres early on and saving fresh tyres for the end,” he explained. “The target was to stay on the lead lap and hope things happen. They did happen with the safety cars: they shook things up and were a huge bonus for someone with fresh tyres for the end.”

Alpine followed up on its Fuji podium with a fourth for the #35 Signatech-run A424 LMDh shared by Ferdinand Habsburg, Paul-Loup Chatin and Jules Gounon with a similar strategy. The sister car, into which Milesi swapped over to join Mick Schumacher and Matthieu Vaxiviere, would probably have inherited the podium had not the first-named been penalised for his contact with Nielsen.

The top six was rounded out by the only one of the two WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 LMDhs to make the finish, the #15 entry shared by the younger Vanthoor, Wittmann and Raffaele Marciello, and Ganassi’s Cadillac V-Series.R driven by Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Sebastien Bourdais. The former was in the mix for a podium before the safety cars, which in team boss Vincent Vosse’s words “undid our good work”. The latter, meanwhile, most definitely wasn’t after Lynn could only qualify 13th and a penalty for FCY speeding by Bourdais.

Storming drive by Buemi, sharing with Hartley and Hirakawa, netted crunch victory in winner-takes-all fight with Porsche

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images