Rebellion win a hollow triumph for imperfect WEC rules

At last, a victory by someone other than Toyota in the World Endurance Championship!

But was Rebellion Racing's win at Shanghai last weekend really what the series needed? Yes and no is the answer to that one.

Yes, because an unbroken run of victories for Toyota stretching back more than a year has been sucking the life out of the WEC.

No, because the series doesn't require a dominant win by one team simply being transposed with an equally dominant victory by another.

That's what we got over four hours of racing around the Shanghai International Circuit on Sunday.

Rebellion had its only previous overall victory in the WEC, at Silverstone in August 2018, handed to it in post-race scrutineering on the exclusion of the Toyotas. The Shanghai win was as good as presented to Rebellion on a plate, too.

The Rebellion was in a class of its own, and the result a foregone conclusion

Victory at Shanghai was Rebellion's to lose courtesy of the new system of success handicaps introduced in LMP1 this season.

So heavily penalised were the Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs that they were unable to fight with the best of the privateers. Nor could they match the pace of the two Ginettas, at least when the British cars were at their fastest.

If you do the averages, the winning Rebellion-Gibson R-13 shared by Bruno Senna, Gustavo Menezes and Norman Nato was eight or nine tenths a lap faster than the second-placed Toyota shared by Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Kazuki Nakajima.

That was more than enough to ensure that Rebellion pretty much dominated. The Team LNT Ginetta squad, as expected for a still-new operation, was unable to knit together a coherent challenge over the full distance.

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Rebellion didn't make things easy for itself early on thanks more to the R-13's inability to get its front tyres up to temperature than Nato's strange decision not to hit the loud pedal when the lights went green. But once Menezes took over with fresh, hot rubber straight from the ovens underneath him, the R-13 was in a class of its own, and the result a foregone conclusion.

Shanghai wasn't a great advert for success handicaps, even if Toyota Motorsport GmbH technical director Pascal Vasselon tried to argue to the contrary. "There has been some entertainment," he said. "We have to be positive."

Vasselon is also confident that it should be closer between his cars and the Rebellion in Bahrain next month.

For a start, the Rebellion will edge towards the Toyotas in terms of penalties carried for the eight-hour race. My maths suggests that the TS050s will be penalised to the tune of 2.72s and the Rebellion by 2.00s per lap. That compares with 2.74s and 0.89s around a slightly longer lap last weekend.

Vasselon also suggests that the TS050 will be less sensitive to the reductions in the fuel it can use and hybrid energy it can deploy - the means by which the Japanese car is penalised - around Sakhir than at Shanghai. The lack of power really took its toll on the two long straights of the Chinese circuit.

There has, unfortunately, not been a lot of racing since the handicaps kicked in

That's probably bad news for Rebellion as it heads to a track on which it has hinted that the R-13 won't be quite such a competitive proposition as at Shanghai, even without an increased handicap. My suspicion is that we will probably be back in a situation where Toyota dominates the final classification, even if Ginetta is right up there on one-lap pace.

The above figures were calculated using the 0.01255s per-kilometre coefficient by which the cars are penalised for every point they lead the lowest championship scorer. The original figure was 0.008s, but it was revised upwards after the Toyotas proved quicker than expected at the Silverstone series opener in September. (It was confusingly rounded down to 0.012s when the increase was publicly confirmed.)

There's an argument that the increase went too far. Had the 0.008s figure remained in force, the Toyotas would have been pegged back by 1.74s a lap at Shanghai. Perhaps that would have allowed them to make a race of it.

The lower coefficient also might have allowed Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez to challenge their team-mates at Fuji. The Silverstone winners were penalised by 1.4s a lap for their home event and the sister car by exactly one second. The 0.4s differential meant there was no race between the two TS050s in Japan.

The much-vaunted success handicaps removed at a stroke the one highlight of the LMP1 class last season - the fight between the two Toyotas. They were always allowed to race each other, even if the team's strict rules of engagement meant that the actual deed of overtaking was usually something of an 'after you, Claude' routine.

We shouldn't forget that success handicaps are a modern - and clever, we are told - take on the success ballast concept. Admittedly, such systems can take a few races to shake themselves out and come good, but what we have right now is not convincingly working for the WEC in its hour of need as the LMP1 era limps to an end.

We are going to have the odd privateer victory, and fingers crossed for a Ginetta win. And the championship battle should also remain close - or at least closer than last season - before the slate is wiped clean and the cars run without handicaps at the Le Mans 24 Hours championship finale next June.

Sharing out the victories and keeping the points close is part of the idea of such systems, whether of the ballast or handicap kind, but I love and write about a sport called motor racing. There has, unfortunately, not been a lot of racing since the handicaps kicked in at Fuji.

Real racing is what the championship needs right now. Not more walkover wins even if they aren't by a Toyota.