How Toyota destroyed the competition to seal the WEC crowns

There were so many unknowns as the World Endurance Championship regrouped in Barcelona last weekend. The circuit, on the schedule in place of Qatar, was new to the majority of teams. There was a new wet-weather tyre, too, which was brought into play by rain before the race and during its early hours. Toyota had neither tested at the Catalan venue nor had any running on the latest Michelin rubber, but it executed to perfection over the Barcelona 6 Hours to record a 1-2 result, seal the WEC Hypercar manufacturers’ title and ensure that at the Monza finale next month one of its two crews will take the drivers’ crown. 

“Clinical” was how Toyota driver Brendon Hartley described its performance on Sunday as he, Sebastien Buemi and Ryo Hirakawa in the team’s #8 entry took the victory to move 17 points clear in the championship race from team-mates Nyck de Vries, Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi. It was a fitting description of a day on which the Japanese manufacturer left the rest of the Hypercar pack trailing in its wake. That included BMW, its nearest rival in both points classifications heading into the weekend and the only manufacturer to have both tested on the 2.89-mile Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya and have anything approaching proper experience of the latest wet tyre. 

What Toyota did have, however, in the TR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar was a car that looked after its tyres on the ageing and aggressive track surface, one that has the highest sustained lateral loads of any circuit on the WEC calendar this year. So many times in the past, the Japanese manufacturer has sealed championship honours at the Bahrain International Circuit, another tyre-eating venue. Barcelona undoubtedly played to what has arguably over the years been Toyota’s biggest strength, but come the race, the TR010 had the advantage in all conditions. So that was on a fully wet circuit, on a drying track and when the conditions were bone dry, and on both the soft and the medium-compound Michelin slick. 

There wasn’t much to choose between the two Toyota line-ups last weekend. The final margin of victory after six hours of racing was just six tenths, though only because Hirakawa backed off in the final laps. With 10 laps to go, he was more than 8s up. On the averages, the #7 car was a sliver quicker, somewhere around a couple of hundredths. But, crucially, #8 was quicker at key moments of the race. That explains why it led 186 of the event’s 198 laps, the sister car just four. 

The lap Hirakawa pulled out to claim second on the grid behind pole winner Mathys Jaubert in the best of the Genesis GMR-001 LMDhs was impressive. Toyota Racing technical director David Floury reckoned he had over-performed in the Hyperpole session in which de Vries was six tenths slower in ninth position. 

Thanks in part to that lap, Buemi was at the front of the field by the end of the first proper racing lap, his task helped by Daniel Juncadella going off in the Genesis at Turn 5. He stayed there through the wet portion of the race, but a startline infringement when he failed to hold his position as the cars approached the lights resulted in a five-second penalty. 

By the end of the first racing lap, the #8 Toyota was in a lead it would rarely relinquish over the course of the next six hours

Photo by: FIA WEC / DPPI

This was only taken at the second round of pitstops an hour and 50 minutes into the race because the first came under a virtual safety car that led into the second safety car of the race. That’s not counting the one under which the race started - the course vehicle stayed out for an extra lap to allow the drivers to familiarise themselves with the wet track. Buemi had led de Vries, who’d made it up to second shortly after the first stops, by less than second before ducking into the pits one lap before his pursuer. The #8 Toyota spent 7s longer on pitroad than #7 as a result of the penalty, allowing Conway to get out ahead of Hartley as both swapped to the soft Michelin slick. But the erstwhile leader was back in front before the end of Conway’s out-lap. 

Buemi was three tenths quicker than de Vries on their corresponding in-laps and then Hartley gained back the rest of the missing seven seconds with the undercut. Hartley had the measure of Conway, starting his penultimate race as a professional racing driver following the announcement of his retirement earlier this month, pulling out a gap of more than 14s as the Toyotas had things all their own way at the front of the field. 

It was “one of the deciding moments of the race,” reckoned Buemi. He pointed out that a following car puts more strain on its tyres running in the slipstream than one out in clean air. “I knew it was going to be critical,” explained Hartley of his first laps on cold rubber as he strove to make up the time lost to the penalty. “I took as much risk as I felt comfortable with and just went for it,” he said. “There have been a few times this year when I didn’t grab the opportunity and I saw that was the time to take some risks.”

Another team principal further down the paddock, who probably shouldn’t be named, went even further: “Toyota made us all look a bit average today”

Kobayashi took over from Conway when the cars stopped again, getting four new mediums. Hartley only received fresh rubber, likewise mediums, on the hard-used lefthand side of the car when he stopped, but he still had 12s on the sister car when a third VSC led into another safety car. The advantage #8 enjoyed was wiped out, but Hirakawa had the measure of Kobayashi when the race went green with just over two hours to go: he was more than three seconds to the good when they stopped again. The gap he enjoyed over de Vries over the remainder of the race was never much less than 5s. 

“The track in some ways is a bit like Bahrain, and in Bahrain we have a strong record of winning there almost every year,” said Floury of the Middle Eastern venue where Toyota hasn’t been beaten since the fixture resumed after a year’s hiatus in 2019. “Here was also about tyre management, which is an area where we are strong. We saw that again today.” 

BMW had a nightmare weekend. It might have tested at Barcelona at the back end of July, admittedly in unrepresentative temperatures, and got some running on the new grooved Michelin rubber at Sebring in the USA, but the German manufacturer and the WRT team were never expecting its M Hybrid V8 LMDh to be entirely at home in Spain given the characteristics of the circuit. Inexperience resulted in Rene Rast and Robin Frijns, the highest-placed non-Toyota drivers heading into the race, losing their chance of the title. 

BMW endured a nightmare Barcelona race as it dropped out of the title picture

Photo by: Paul Foster

Rast was left out on track during the first safety car as WRT once again rolled the dice tactically, but the slow running behind the course vehicle resulted in his rear tyres dropping below the mandated minimum pressures. The car was called into the pits to address the problem and then had to take a 20s penalty. The #20 car in which Rast and Frijns were joined by Sheldon van der Linde fell a lap down and out of championship contention before trailing home 14th. 

A 10s penalty for contact early in the second hour didn’t help the cause of the sister car driven by Kevin Magnussen, Dries Vanthoor and Raffaello Marciello. A top six looked possible, but a smattering of points wasn’t going to help BMW’s cause in the manufacturers’ title race, which explained another off-kilter strategy call in the closing stages to try to pull something out of the bag. They went long on fuel and didn’t change tyres at the final stop, the same tactic that yielded fourth for the #38 Jota Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh shared by Jack Aitken, Sebastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber. It didn’t pay off for BMW: the #15 car came home only seventh, also drawing a line through Magnussen and Marciello’s faint chance of the drivers’ crown. “We didn’t have a trouble-free race and when you want to fight for a world championship, you can’t have races like this,” said BMW M Motorsport boss Andreas Roos.

Ferrari took the final podium position, just shy of 40s behind the winning Toyota, with the #50 499P LMH shared by Nicklas Nielsen, Miguel Molina and Antonio Fuoco on a day that it waved goodbye to its remote hopes of retaining the end-of-season silverware it claimed in 2025. Hometown driver Molina was more than happy to be “best of the rest” behind the dominant Japanese cars. “Whatever the conditions, they were superior today, that’s it,” he said of Toyota. “There was nothing more we could have done.”

The same went for everyone else in the Hypercar field. Roos reckoned the TR010s were in a “different league”. Another team principal further down the paddock, who probably shouldn’t be named, went even further: “Toyota made us all look a bit average today.”

Toyota will celebrate winning both WEC titles in Monza next month

Photo by: JEP