How Toyota was deposed by Rebellion and the rules

Another World Endurance Championship race, another walkover. Only this time it wasn't Toyota that dominated but Rebellion Racing.

Bruno Senna, Gustavo Menezes and Norman Nato swept to a one-minute victory for the Swiss entrant over just four hours of racing at Shanghai on a day when the heavily penalised Japanese cars were unable to race with the best of the LMP1 privateers.

The system of success handicaps introduced in LMP1 at the start of the 2019-20 WEC did the job for which they were conceived - to offer a chance to the privateers. But last weekend it didn't so much as give the drivers of the Rebellion-Gibson R-13 a shot at victory as hand it to them on a plate.

The two Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs arrived in China with the maximum permissible level of penalties, reductions to the amount of fuel and hybrid energy available designed to add 2.74 seconds to the cars' lap times.

Combined with the extra 28kg the TS050s are carrying compared to last year, the Toyota Motorsport GmbH squad reckoned it had lost four seconds around the 3.44-mile Shanghai International Circuit. The lack of power, conventional and electrical, took its toll on a circuit with two long straights.

The strange thing was that Rebellion bagged the pole despite getting nowhere near its 2018 qualifying mark.

Andre Lotterer had set a 1m42.8s last year, whereas this time around Senna's qualifying best was a 1m45.7s.

It couldn't be explained away by the 0.89s worth of success penalties - all in good old-fashioned ballast - the R-13 was carrying last weekend. In fact, both team and drivers were at a complete loss to explain it.

But the pace of the Rebellion was still good enough to make it a shoo-in for victory. The ORECA-run squad and its drivers conceded that this was their race to lose, and it looked for a while that they were making a good fist at doing just that.

Polesitter Nato looked to have a problem at the start and was fourth into the first corner and sixth, with an LMP2 car ahead of him, by the end of the first lap.

In fact, he'd just chosen not to accelerate when the lights went green. The two Ginettas, started second and third by Charlie Robertson and Ben Hanley, did, along with Kamui Kobayashi in the fourth-placed TS050.

It was a bizarre incident and the drivers of the two Ginettas and the Toyota were subsequently penalised for jumping the start.

Robertson, Hanley and Kobayashi deserved their drivethroughs if you took the law at its letter, because they had overtaken the Rebellion before the startline and it is the car on pole that sets the pace on the run to the flag.

But Toyota Motorsport GmbH technical director Pascal Vasselon probably had a point when he suggested Nato's behaviour was dangerous because it backed up the LMP1 field into the LMP2 pack.

"It's an issue we have to look at," he said. "It has safety implications."

Nato did actually have a problem in the early laps, but it was one that he knew was coming. The R-13 has always had an issue warming up its front tyres, a problem exacerbated by a prolonged grid procedure ahead of the start of the race. It explains why he took four laps to get ahead of LMP2 leader Will Stevens in the Jackie Chan DC Racing ORECA-Gibson 07 and why he fell 30s off the lead in the space of little more than half an hour.

The Frenchman finally got some temperature in his Michelin tyres towards the end of his stint and passed Kobayashi shortly before the Toyota stopped for the first time. It was at the Rebellion's first stop that its race started to come alive.

Menezes resumed with fresh Michelins straight from the ovens and started to fly. He moved up to fourth when the two Ginettas took their drivethroughs after 34 laps and he claimed the lead from Sebastien Buemi's Toyota four laps later, leaving the TS050 for dead.

Buemi was on tyres that were two stints old at this stage, but even when Brendon Hartley got fresh rubber at the next stop the gap between the top two cars continued to go up. It stood at more than half a minute at the halfway mark.

A full-course yellow virtual safety car with almost exactly an hour to go as good as sealed the victory for Rebellion. It removed any chance that the Toyotas could have completed the race on one stop less than Rebellion.

"It might have looked easy from the outside," said Senna, who became the first driver to win in all four classes in the WEC (he won in GTE Am in an Aston Martin at Fuji in 2013, in case you were wondering), "but we were pushing 100% all the time. There was no tyre saving or fuel saving, because the target was to build a gap in case something happened."

Buemi, Hartley and Kazuki Nakajima ended up 66s down at the chequered flag. Toyota could have no complaints, because it agreed to the success penalties and even helped write the rules.

Another improvement for Bahrain could make the Ginetta a dark horse for victory

"We knew it was going to be tough today, but I think we did the best with what we had," said Buemi. "We operated well and were quicker than the other Toyota - it is always good to know that you can beat your sister car."

The second Toyota went a lap down with six minutes left on the clock. Kobayashi, Jose Maria Lopez and Mike Conway weren't a match for their team-mates and their cause wasn't helped by the drivethrough or an issue with the belts when Lopez took over mid-race that cost them more precious seconds.

"Our team-mates just did the better job this weekend," said Conway. "We were fighting the car all day, so it was quite a tough one for us."

The two Ginetta-AER G60-LT-P1s run by the Team LNT works squad starred in the early stages, running 1-2 to the first round of stops.

Hanley briefly led a few laps later on in the opening hour before he took his drivethrough, but the challenge of the British cars wilted over the course of the race. That said, Ginetta did get the two cars home to the finish without technical problems in fourth and fifth positions.

Hanley and team-mates Jordan King and Egor Orudzhev were over a minute behind the second Toyota in fourth aboard the #5 car that was running penalties worth 0.65s.

The unpenalised second #6 Ginetta, which claimed fastest lap with Robertson at the wheel, was a further lap behind. The car, co-driven by Mike Simpson and Guy Smith, lost time when Robertson overshot his pit and when Simpson was penalised 10s in the pits for an FCY infraction.

Ginetta technical director Peter Smith wasn't sure that the G60s had lost pace through the race and appeared happy with the improvement in pitstops, even if the team has got some way to go to match Rebellion, let alone Toyota.

"We need to analyse that," said Smith, "but we definitely feel that we have made progress again. We had good pace, neither car came into the garage and we are getting there with our pitstops - you shouldn't forget that every person on the crew has got a full-time job doing something else back at the factory."

Another improvement for the Bahrain 8 Hours next month could just make Ginetta a dark horse for victory given the G60's pace last weekend. Don't forget that the Rebellion will be further penalised - by somewhere in the region of a two seconds a lap - at a circuit more favourable than Shanghai to a Toyota carrying the maximum penalties.

Rebellion might well have had its day in the sun in China.

Aston, then Ferrari lose out in GTE

Porsche was the official winner and Ferrari was the on-the-road winner, but the moral winner in GTE Pro at Shanghai was Aston Martin.

The British marque lost the victory with a tad over an hour to go, handing Ferrari a class win that then passed over to Porsche drivers Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen in post-race scrutineering.

Danish duo Nicki Thiim and Marco Sorensen had victory snatched from their grasp when their Aston Martin Vantage GTE, 18 seconds in the clear at the time, sustained a puncture.

Yet it wasn't the deflated tyre that cost them the win, rather the full-course yellow virtual safety car that followed.

Thiim was still ahead of the rest of the six-car field when he made it to the pits for what would be his final stop. By rights, Sorensen would have emerged in the lead when everyone else came in for fuel and tyres.

The problem was that much of the carcass of the errant Michelin was lying just off the racing line ahead of the final corner. The yellow flags flew and the chasing pack stopped on the following lap with the 80km/h (50mph) speed limit in force.

Sorensen was fifth after the stops, and that's where he stayed, the Danish car only gaining a place with the post-race shenanigans.

Thiim had led the early going before dropping to second behind Estre and then ducking straight into the pits as the tyres under him gave up. He'd started on the Michelins on which he and his team-mate had completed a pair of qualifying laps apiece. But once on fresh tyres, the Aston was in a class of its own.

The 'winning' AF Ferrari inherited the lead after the final stops. James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi came out on top in a battle with Estre and Christensen that raged for much of the race and included a clash at the exit of the pitlane at the opening stops.

That proved decisive. The Porsche had to take a 10s penalty for an unsafe release at its next stop. Estre got the gap down to less than that, just under seven seconds, after starting the final stint 15s down on Pier Guidi, but was never able to get close enough to make a bid for the lead.

The race went Porsche's way hours later when the Ferrari was thrown out after the rideheight was found to be under the 50mm minimum. That promoted Gianmaria Bruni and Richard Lietz to the runner-up spot in the second Porsche, while Maxime Martin and Alex Lynn took a consolation podium for Aston.

Jota and Goodyear top LMP2

Jota Sport dominated LMP2 in China. The ORECA team running in Goodyear colours under its own name for Anthony Davidson, Antonio Felix da Costa and Roberto Gonzalez - together with the Jackie Chan DC Racing machine fielded for Will Stevens, Ho-Pin Tung and Gabriel Aubry - led all bar one lap of the race.

The difference between them on the day was essentially former Peugeot and Toyota LMP1 driver Davidson.

The Jota-entered ORECA-Gibson 07 finished the four hours 17 seconds up the road from the Chan/DC example. That was about what Davidson put between himself and Stevens over the second half of the opening double stint of the race.

The two Jota-run ORECAs were pretty evenly matched but the Goodyear-liveried car was always in the ascendency, thanks to Davidson's early heroics

Stevens led from the start, briefly getting in among the LMP1s, and was 7s ahead of Davidson after the first stops. Yet by the time they climbed out of their respective mounts, the positions had been reversed and the gap had increased to the eventual margin of victory.

Stevens' Goodyear tyres had, he said, "fallen off the cliff" just a handful of laps into the second half of his stint. Davidson's Goodyears hung in there, he reckoned, because he babied them all the way through his run, the only time each of the Jota cars did a conventional double on the same four tyres.

"We knew that tyre wear was going to be critical here," said Davidson, who was driving a new chassis at Shanghai. "I turned the traction control up higher than ever before and I didn't lean on the tyres in the long corners. Maybe it was my Formula 1 punditry [on Sky Sports] and talking about how the drivers have to look after their tyres coming into play."

The two Jota-run ORECAs were pretty evenly matched over the remainder of the race, but the Goodyear-liveried car was always in the ascendency, thanks to Davidson's early heroics.

Goodyear appeared to have the edge over Michelin on the way to its first victory since its return to international motorsport in this year's WEC. None of the Michelin runners truly threatened, although the United Autosports squad almost certainly would have done had its ORECA shared by Filipe Albuquerque, Paul di Resta and Phil Hanson not lost 40s in the opening laps.

A discarded visor tear-off blocked the engine air-intake at the end of the first lap, losing the car power and 20km/h (12mph) on the straights. The team opted to leave Albuquerque out on track until he'd completed nine laps. That was equal to the short stint the car was scheduled to undertake after a final fuel-only stop at the end of the race - United effectively brought its splash-and-dash forward by the better part of four hours.

Di Resta overhauled the Signatech Alpine with 19 laps left to seal the podium on another bad day for the team that claimed the title last season.

Its Alpine-badged ORECA took fourth in the hands of Thomas Laurent, Andre Negrao and Pierre Ragues, but once again it didn't have the pace of the frontrunners. A late spin for Laurent wiped out any chance they had of standing on the podium, something they did every time out in the 2018-19 superseason.

Silverstone winner Cool Racing claimed pole position with Nicolas Lapierre and Antonin Borga, the former running second to Stevens to the first round of stops.

The car was back in a handful of laps later after receiving the black-and-orange warning flag because it was no longer sending the required data to race control. Attempts to fix the telemetry issue failed and the car was retired.