How Porsche privateers proved their worth in an elongated WEC Spa 6 Hours

Porsche made it two out of three in the World Endurance Championship this year at Spa last Saturday, but the significance of the victory was the identity of the winning car. It wasn’t one of the factory Porsche Penske Motorsport entries but a customer 963 LMDh fielded by the British Jota squad. Will Stevens and Callum Ilott needed a significant slice of luck to pull off the win, though they did it on a day that the privateers, the Proton Competition car included, had the edge over the factory.

Stevens and Ilott, driving as a duo courtesy of regular team-mate Norman Nato’s presence at the Berlin Formula E round, came out on top over the final 100 minutes after a not uncontroversial restart — that’s the decision to get going again rather than the start itself — following a protracted stoppage for barrier repairs. Ilott had the edge over Kevin Estre in the best of the PPM cars shared with Laurens Vanthoor and Andre Lotterer. It was a two-car race to the end: everyone else was out of it, including the two Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercars that had sat on the grid in positions one and two before the action got going again after nearly two hours. This was another one that got away from the Italian manufacturer, and this time through no fault of its own.

The Spa 6 Hours boiled down to a straight fight between the #12 Jota car, again the best of the team’s two golden Hertz-liveried cars, and the Qatar-winning PPM machine. They were two of the three cars in Hypercar to come into the pits for their fourth pitstops just before the race was neutralised when a charging Earl Bamber, up to fourth in the solo Ganassi-run Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh, tangled with Sean Gelael’s LMGT3 class WRT BMW on the Kemmel Straight.

It was a dramatic accident from which both drivers walked away unscathed. So dramatic that the red flags were thrown immediately. There was no Virtual Safety Car leading into one of the real kind — the new procedure introduced for 2024 — that would have allowed the rest of the field to duck into the pits. That meant the time the two Porsches had lost to scheduled stops was largely mitigated by the race neutralisation. They might have been down in fifth and sixth — Lotterer ahead of Ilott — before the stops, but they were going to move into P1 and P2 when everyone else pitted on the presumption that the race was resumed. And it was a presumption: the clock had ticked past the 19:00 finish time when things got going again behind the safety car.

Ilott had got ahead of the factory car during the pit cycle: he stopped one lap later and was quicker on his in-lap. When the restarted race went green and the Porsches moved to the top of the order as the rest of the field pitted, the Brit had the edge on his French rival. He quickly eked out some briefing space and built up a lead of five seconds in 10 laps. Estre’s cause wasn’t helped by the fact that two of the four tyres he’d taken at his stop had already been used in qualifying. He then got four tyres at his final stop, while Ilott was given lefts only. With more tyre temperature, the Brit quickly doubled his lead. The job was done.

“This result has been coming,” said Stevens. “I’ve always said when we do the perfect race we should be up the sharp end. We did that today. There was a bit of luck along the way, but I’m a firm believer that in this game you make your own luck.”

As the race went past its scheduled finish time, the #12 Porsche pulled clear of the chasing factory #6 Porsche

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Jota didn’t have the fastest car at Spa but it did have the edge on the factory 963 when it mattered. “They were quicker at the beginning of the race,” explained Ilott. “We needed to get ourselves in the window a bit. Will wasn’t so happy when the temperatures were higher, but when it started cooling down the car came into a nice window.”

In the year since the debut of its first 963 at this race last year, Jota had repeatedly showed its pace. There were starring performances at Le Mans and Bahrain when it ran a solo car last season and then the second-place finish first time out at Qatar this campaign on its expansion to two cars. But a victory meant the boys from the farmyard as they like to call themselves — a nod to the location of their factory — has joined the pantheon of Porsche privateer greats, the likes of Joest, Kremer, Brun and Richard Lloyd’s team. Spa on Saturday was the first overall world championship sportscar victory for a customer Porsche since the 1980s. Joest Racing was the last team to do it at Dijon 1989 if you don’t interpret the help it was getting as conferring factory status, otherwise it was Britten-Lloyd Racing at the Norisring in 1987.

The victory for Jota and the pace of the Proton car shared by Julien Andlauer and Neel Jani that led more laps than any other car at the weekend provided validation for Porsche’s decision to produce customer cars and bring them on in year one of the programme. Porsche has always stressed the difficulties that entailed while insisting that it was a key tenet of the project.

“This is proof of the 963 and our decision to build cars for customers,” said Urs Kuratle, who heads up the LMDh programme at Porsche Motorsport. “It was really nice to see the performance of our customers here at Spa and at the end of the day it good for Porsche, good for the WEC and good for the sport.”

Kicking off proceedings again seemed the right thing to do, not least in the interests of sporting equity. This was, after all, a race that had already been neutralised for 54 minutes across the second and third hours

Yet there would have been no Porsche victory but for the decision to restart the race once it became clear that it wouldn’t be possible to get going again before seven o’clock.

Approximately 80 metres of barrier needed repairs after what was a clear misjudgement by Bamber as he challenged the Proton Porsche for position. As he jinked out of its slipstream he ended up hitting both the M4 GT3 Gelael shared with Augusto Farfus/Darren Leung and the Proton car. He tagged the BMW as he jinked right and then almost simultaneously kissed the back of the prototype. The stewards report announcing that Bamber had been given a five-place grid penalty for his next WEC outing at Le Mans in June suggested that the first contact was with the Porsche.

Whatever the cause, it triggered a massive accident. Bamber barrel-rolled on the grass, while Gelael was turned into the barriers on the right before pinballing across the track into the Armco on the right.

Bamber has picked up a five-place grid penalty for Le Mans for the #2 Cadillac having been blamed for the crash which triggered the red flag

Photo by: Emanuele Clivati | AG Photo

WEC races are normally called when the clock hits the scheduled finish time: your correspondent can’t remember this kind of reset in the years since the rebirth of the championship in 2012. But the rules do allow for it. It is there in black and white: it’s Article 15.3.1 of the sporting rules if you want to look it up. It seemed the right thing to do given that Spa had attracted a record crowd for a current-era WEC race outside of Le Mans. The three-day attendance was 88,180, and a good proportion of them had hung around in the sunshine. Kicking off proceedings again seemed the right thing to do, not least in the interests of sporting equity. This was, after all, a race that had already been neutralised for 54 minutes across the second and third hours.

For Ferrari, though, it didn’t feel very fair. Not when it ‘lost’ what would surely have been a 1-2 result for its two factory cars. So much so that it protested the stewards decision announcing the 1h44m — the remaining time left on the clock minus the three minutes it took for the field to line-up on the grid - for which the race would be restarted at 19:10. Its protest was ruled inadmissible and rejected.

Ferrari sportscar boss Antonello Coletta was “surprised” and “disappointed” by the decision to go again for the full distance. “We were in a condition to win the race and I am not happy,” he said. “My expectation was that we could maybe restart for some laps to finish the race but not to restart completely for one hour and 44 minutes.”

PLUS: How rain and strategy spelled disaster for Ferrari in WEC Imola 6 Hours

Losing the victory after doing nothing wrong was a bitter blow for Ferrari, coming so soon after it threw one away at Imola last month. More so because it had come through to the front after a disastrous qualifying. James Calado had missed out on a spot in the Hyperpole session for the fastest 10 cars in the opening session after “screwing up both my laps”. He would start 11th, which then became 10th… Antonio Fuoco had plonked the other 499P on pole by half a second and then lost the time when the car was found to be 1kg underweight, the result, said Ferrari, of the replacement parts that went on the car after a clash with a LMGT3 car in Free Practice 3 being slightly lighter than the originals. The Italian had to line-up at the back of the 19-car Hypercar pack.

Ferrari had the quickest car around the 4.35-mile Circuit de la Spa-Francorchamps despite the Balance of Performance hit the car took in Belgium. The 499P had to race at 12kg heavier than at Imola, whereas the increases in minimum weight for the rest of the field as the BoP was reshuffled for a very different track at Spa were no more than four kilos. It wasn’t enough, suggested some even before the event had kicked off. Toyota, the winner in Italy after Ferrari’s faux pas, was predicting not much was going to change as a result of the new BoP.

So it turned out when the serious end of the meeting started with qualifying. In the race, the two Ferraris made quick progress up the order. Antonio Giovinazzi in the car he shared with Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi was third by the time the first round of stops started, behind Andlauer in the Proton car and Frederic Makowiecki in the #5 Penske Porsche. Nicklas Nielsen in other car in which he was teamed with Fuoco and Miguel Molina was still down in 12th at this stage, but then quickly rose up the order in the second half of his double.

Ferrari looked destined for victory before the red flag and subsequent restart

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Twelve months ago, Ferrari had put in a stirring performance on the hard Michelin slick, but this time it wasn’t available. The tyre supplier nominated the soft and the medium compound for Spa this year. The 499P didn’t look after its rubber as well as some of its rivals last year, but if there was any doubt that it hasn’t improved in terms of controlling tyre degradation, an answer was provided on a hot afternoon last Saturday. Calado took the lead from Jani just after the three-hour mark. Fuoco then closed on the Porsche as its driver struggled — he’d been given the tyres on which Andlauer had qualified mid-stint - before taking second spot shortly before the red flag.

Fuoco and his team-mates ended up third in the final order ahead of the sister car because Pier Guidi didn’t have enough fuel to get through the four-lap safety car under which the race resumed and had to stop while the pits were closed for a five-second splash of fuel, a so-called emergency pitstop. Fuoco, however, was able to pit after the green flag had flown. But the Italian was still a minute back on the Jota car at the finish.

Proton took fifth behind the two Ferraris, a poor result for its efforts. It was the quickest Porsche on Saturday after the first time it had got through the practice sessions without issues. That was crucial, reckoned Andlauer. “We did everything right this weekend,” he said. “We are disappointed by the final result.”

Porsche has shown that the 963 is now a competitive proposition on a range of circuits, but Ferrari, even without a win to its name this year, has the fastest car

The other contender at Spa, and there was only one, was Cadillac. Lynn posted the best qualifying performance for the V-Series.R with third even before Fuoco’s demotion and then Bamber stormed from 12th to fourth after the first safety car. Team boss Stephen Mitas reckoned second place between the two Ferraris was within reach.

Toyota snuck into the top six, helped by the retirement of the Cadillac and the second Penske Porsche after Michael Christensen took too much kerb as result of a change in the wind direction and the car bottomed out — said the team in a statement — sending him into the barriers and retirement. The #8 took sixth directly ahead of #7 on a day that the GR010 HYBRID LMH wasn’t in the ballpark and both cars were penalised.

The sixth-placed car was given five seconds for repeatedly going over the maximum hybrid power during the formation laps, the sister car a stop/go because Nyck de Vries went over 80km/h (50mph) during the VSC leading into the first safety car.

Now it’s on to Le Mans. Porsche has shown that the 963 is now a competitive proposition on a range of circuits, but Ferrari, even without a win to its name this year, has the fastest car. A machine that’s quick around Spa is normally quick around the Circuit de la Sarthe at Le Mans…

Could it be Ferrari vs Porsche at Le Mans this year?

Photo by: Emanuele Clivati | AG Photo

Differing fortunes for French squads

Alpine and Peugeot rounded out the points behind the satellite Ferrari run by AF Corse. But they left Spa with entirely different opinions of their performances on the way to respective ninth and 10th positions. One French manufacturer was encouraged, the other disappointed.

Ninth for the Alpine A424 LMDh shared by Charles Milesi, Paul-Loup Chatin and Jules Gounon didn’t match its seventh position on debut at Qatar in March. But that one owed more to strategy as outright performance. Alpine was closer to the pace in Spa — Milesi notched up a first by getting through into Hyperpole — and might have picked up an even better result but for a few hundred metres of track position.

The sister car shared by Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Mick Schumacher ended up a lap down in 12th. But the car had stopped out of eighth just before the red. Vaxiviere came out a lap down on the race-leading Ferrari. Had he been in front he would have got a wave-around and a podium finish wouldn’t have been out of the question.

Alpine opted for a different set-up approach at Spa. It didn’t go into details, but it paid dividends. “We keep learning, and we wanted to have a better vision and understanding of our car and how we operate it,” said team principal Philippe Sinault.

Peugeot insisted it was expecting no more than it got with 10th for Nico Muller and Mikkel Jensen. It wasn’t allowed to mention the Balance of Performance, of course, but there was clearly disquiet that the revised 9X8 wasn’t given a helping hand post-Imola.

BMW finished outside the top 10 for the first time. The two WRT-run M Hybrid V8 LMDhs ended up 11th and 13th after both received penalties. Raffaele Marciello was given a 30s stop/go for engaging reverse in the pitlane, while Rene Rast and Robin Frijns were pinged in the sister car. Rast was bizarrely given a drive-through for a collision with Jota driver Phil Hanson on the run from Malmedy to Rivage/Bruxelles. He’d got a run on the Brit, who then jinked out to pass Ahmad Al Harthy’s WRT BMW M4, the contact that followed spinning the Porsche into the LMGT3 and triggering the first safety car. Frijns was given five seconds for gaining an advantage by going off track while lapping an LMGT3 car.

For Alpine, Peugeot and BMW it was a race of mixed fortunes

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images