The "intense" issues Toyota navigated for WEC title glory in Bahrain

There wasn’t really much doubt in Bahrain that Toyota was going to seal another World Endurance Championship drivers’ crown to go with the manufacturers’ title it took last time out in Fuji. If there was a question mark, it was over which of its two crews was going to make it five in a row for the Japanese manufacturer. The shame for a championship that hasn’t quite delivered the intended spectacle in the maiden season of its so-called golden age, the Le Mans 24 Hours excepted, was that any uncertainty was pretty much removed at the first corner.

As Sebastien Buemi accelerated out of the opening sequence of corners and up the hill to Turn 4 at the start of last Saturday’s Bahrain 8 Hours, he could see mayhem in his mirrors. The first corner dramas that he feared so much that he could barely sleep the night before affected team-mate Mike Conway rather than him. The #7 Toyota GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar was tapped into a spin by a locked-up Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh with Earl Bamber at the wheel, and suddenly Buemi and team-mates Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa had a second hand on the end-of-season Hypercar championship trophy.

The grip of the first hand that had been resting on the silverware since Le Mans when Buemi and co took second place had tightened after qualifying when Hartley claimed pole position and the point that goes with it. Now the drivers of #8 only had to finish third, even if Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez took a maximum in this points-and-a-half eight-hour race.

In the event, #8 appeared to win with relative ease, finishing 47.5s up the road from the sister car to give Buemi and Hartley their fourth world titles and Hirakawa a second to go with the one he claimed as part of this trio last year. There was really no way back for the #7 crew after the first lap on a day that #8 had a narrow performance advantage in the internecine Toyota battle.

A fourth Toyota 1-2 of the season wasn’t as straightforward as it looked, however. The run to the championship by #8 could have been derailed by a clutch issue, while #7 encountered a problem with one of the driveshaft torque sensors that was similar but not quite the same as the one that restricted it to ninth place at Algarve back in April.

The winning GR010 repeatedly lost time in the pits in the final stages of the race, four seconds here, five seconds there. Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director Pascal Vasselon used the word “critical” to describe the problem at one point, though the total time loss probably wasn’t much more than 10s.

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

The winning Toyota had clutch woes that impacted it at every pitstop

The clutch wasn’t opening, which meant the team couldn’t use the starter motor to get going in pitlane. Instead it had to bump start the twin-turbo V6 by getting rolling under power from the front axle hybrid system. It wasn’t as easy as expected.

“We had to pull the car with the front, but the problem was that the cold tyres meant the fronts were spinning and the rears were not rotating,” explained Vasselon. “The tyres were dragging and not cranking the engine. In the end we went to start in second, which was better.”

The sister car simply lost pace over the second half of the race, long after it had made it up to second late in hour two, as a result of the issue with the torque sensor. An electronic issue inside the sensor caused the problem in Portugal; this time the sensor around the driveshaft broke in half and was hanging free over the second half of the race.

At the Algarve race, the #7 Toyota had to complete the race at much reduced power. This time, the power loss was much less, as a result of new protocols introduced since to monitor power delivery in the event of such a failure

“We were questioning whether to stop and properly disconnect it or take the risk and have it rip off,” said Vasselon, who explained that the second option would have almost certainly resulted in immediate retirement. “We were looking at the pitstops: it was hanging but it was staying in one place, so we went for it.”

At the Algarve race, the #7 Toyota had to complete the race at much reduced power. This time, the power loss was much less, as a result of new protocols introduced since to monitor power delivery in the event of such a failure.

“We are working more precisely in terms of back-up now, but it is not exactly like normal,” explained Vasselon. “So to make sure have we have no gain when these kind of things happen we have to detune the car.”

Vasselon described the Bahrain 8 Hours as “quite intense” for Toyota as a result of the issues for each of the GR010s. He was also unhappy about the first-corner incident, pointing out that Bamber was locked up for a good 100 metres and asking “is this club racing?”. He also suggested that Toyota didn’t have it as easy as it looked, problems or no.

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Bamber locked up into the first corner and clattered into Conway, effectively ending the title contest unless the #8 Toyota hit trouble

Buemi was able to pull away from the chasing pack after the start: he was five seconds up on Miguel Molina in the #50 Ferrari 499P LMH after just six laps. If there was ever a threat the Toyota hegemony in the Middle East last weekend it came in the sixth hour when Antonio Felix da Costa was closing on Lopez for the runner-up spot aboard the Jota team’s customer Porsche 963 LMDh. The Portuguese driver got to within 12s of the second-placed Toyota before a penalty both derailed the challenge and removed the chance of third Porsche podium of the season.

Porsche was again best of the rest in Bahrain, Jota taking over the baton from the Penske factory team that had taken third at Fuji in September. The car only qualified ninth in Will Stevens’s hands as the result of a braking glitch, but the Brit came out of the first-corner melee in sixth, quickly made it up to fifth and then took Michael Christensen for fourth on lap 18 to top the Porsche order.

Ten laps later he was up to third ahead of Molina, who had dropped behind team-mate Alessandro Pier Guidi after 12 laps. Stevens almost immediately fell back to fourth when a recovering Conway came past, but it would be the first of five passes on a Ferrari by the Jota car last weekend.

Yifei Ye would repeat the move on #50, now with Antonio Fuoco at the wheel, after taking over from Stevens and beginning his own charge that took him on to the tail of James Calado in the #51 Ferrari. Da Costa continued the good work after taking over the controls of the #38 Porsche. The #51 car had lost time in the pits, so when he got the better of a post-pitstop battle with Nicklas Nielsen in #50, he was able to establish himself in third and set off after the Toyotas.

The gap to #7 came down from 16 to 12s ahead of the next round of stops before da Costa went off at Turn 1. He was adjudged to have then rejoined the track unsafely right in front of the GTE Am class D’Station Aston Martin and given a drive-through penalty. Stevens secured fourth ahead of #51 after retaking the controls and then closed down on Fuoco, crossing the line just under a second behind.

There was no disappointment on Jota’s part, however. Team principal Sam Hignett pointed out how far the team has come after getting its 963 two races late at Spa in April.

“If you’d asked me back then that we’d be fighting with Ferrari for a podium and finishing only nine tenths behind after eight hours of racing, I would have taken that,” said Hignett, who then made reference to the humble location of the team’s workshops. “We’re the boys from the farmyard racing against the might of Maranello.”

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Jota had the potential to finish on the podium for the first time with its 963 but ended up just shy

If there was any disappointment in the Jota camp, it resulted from da Costa’s penalty and its severity. Hignett pointed out that vision out of a modern prototype is limited in the era of the HANS Device and that drivers had been told by race control not to rejoin the track on the exit of Turn 3 if they went onto the asphalt run-off at the first corner. Coming back at a sharp angle, he reckoned, was always going to cause problems.

Ferrari was back on the podium with the #50 shared by Molina, Nielsen and Fuoco after a race away at Fuji despite, said technical director Ferdinando Cannizzo, “not having the fastest car today, or even the second fastest”. The 499P was a definite third in the pecking order behind the Toyota and the Porsche last weekend.

Ferrari was pretty despondent following the opening day of free practice after its two cars ended up eighth and ninth in an opening period affected by high winds and then rain, and only 10th and 11th in the more representative evening session. The car lacked both straightline speed and traction on the low-speed hairpins that proliferate on the 3.36-mile Bahrain International Circuit. But Ferrari got its head down and came up with a set-up focused on getting the most out of its Michelin tyres, not the 499P’s strong suit this year, on the abrasive track surface.

The #51 Ferrari, whose drivers retained a remote chance of the title coming into Bahrain, was afflicted by a rear damping issue that robbed the car of grip and wasn’t fully understood

“We never give up,” said Cannizzo after the race. “We are proud of the results because we were able to play with the strategy in a way to get on the podium. We were working hard to see how we could manage our pace, our set-ups, our pitstops, our energy, everything, to give us the possibility to beat the other cars even though they were faster than us over a single lap.”

That strategy included changing three tyres — rather than the more normal four or two - on a pair of occasions as Ferrari and the AF Corse team looked how to best stretch its allocation of 26 Michelins over the eight hours. Cannizzo even went as far to say that Ferrari had the most consistent car over a double stint in Hypercar.

The #50 managed to finish on the same lap as the Toyotas whereas both its cars had been a lap down at Fuji. There wasn’t much between the two Ferraris on Saturday, nothing at all after the penultimate round of pitstops when they appeared to make faint contact on two occasions.

Pier Guidi, who’d taken over from Antonio Giovinazzi a lap earlier than Fuoco had replaced Nielsen, ended up overtaking the sister car on the dirt as he arrived on his tail with the warmer tyres. Ferrari told its drivers to immediately reverse the positions two corners later in the name of fairness: “We asked them to swap positions because it was not a proper overtake,” said Cannizzo.

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The #50 Ferrari crew joined the Toyota drivers on the podium to put a terrible Fuji behind them

Pier Guidi faded to sixth at the finish, dropping behind the best placed of the Penske Porsches shared by Laurens Vanthoor, Kevin Estre and Andre Lotterer. The #51 Ferrari, whose drivers retained a remote chance of the title coming into Bahrain, was afflicted by a rear damping issue that robbed the car of grip and wasn’t fully understood in the immediate aftermath of the race.

The Porsche factory team took its hat off to Jota on a day that the British squad had the fastest 963 and the one with the fewest issues, though rising brake temperatures were a concern at the end.

The #6 car might have had a shot at the podium had Vanthoor not been delayed by the first corner dramas. Estre had qualified the car fourth, but his Belgian team-mate completed the opening lap down in ninth. He then sustained nose damage as he fought his way back through the field, losing the car more seconds when it was changed at the second stop. Both Penske Porsches were fighting various electronic glitches right through the race.

“Today there was eight hours of constant radio calls with the ops room,” said 963 project leader Urs Kuratle. “It was really a busy race for us.”

The electronic issues included a problem with the speed limiter on the #5 car driven by Christensen, Dane Cameron and Frederic Makowiecki. It was pinged for speeding during both the Full Course Yellow virtual safety cars, receiving a five-second penalty each time, and ended up a distant seventh.

There wasn’t much to say about Peugeot, except that its 9X8 LMH wasn’t a competitive proposition in its current form courtesy of the slow corners that proliferate at Bahrain and that it finished ahead of the Proton Porsche. But that was only because the German team’s entry shared by Neel Jani, Harry Tincknell and Gianmaria Bruni had to be nursed to the finish thanks to a brake overheating problem.

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Electrical glitches hampered both Penske-run works Porsches in Bahrain

Cadillac promise dashed

This looked like a wasted opportunity for Cadillac to finally make it onto the podium in a regular World Endurance round and restore the momentum that has drained away since Bamber, Alex Lynn and Richard Westbrook did get a top three at the Le Mans 24 Hours in June. There was every reason to believe that the Ganassi-run V-Series.R would return to form in Bahrain before it all went wrong at the first corner.

Lynn had put the Caddy third on the grid, a season’s high qualifying position. The Brit had achieved that on the Michelin hard tyre, the Toyotas ahead of it on the faster medium as they squabbled over the all-important point for pole. A significant chunk of the seven-tenth deficit could be put down to a choice of tyres that came with a risk. Toyota would have to use its mediums over a full stint in the race.

The Cadillac Racing squad also went into the WEC finale believing that it had a good race car; the Caddy has generally been second best at looking after its tyres this year after Toyota.

The car was already a lap down after an hour and trailed home 11th three laps down after encountering an undisclosed problem that may or may not have been linked to the first corner biff

“It was a really positive day," said Lynn at the end of a day on Friday when he also topped the times in final free practice. "We were quick on one lap and we’re quick on the long run, too. We're motivated to have a good day tomorrow.”

It couldn’t have been much worse, as it turned out. Bamber insisted that he wasn’t trying to be heroic at the first corner when he locked up, but the mistake and the incident it triggered had multiple repercussions for the Caddy: the car dropped to seventh, the nose was damaged, the tyres flat spotted and the stewards enraged. The New Zealander was deemed to have caused a collision and handed a one-minute stop/go. The car was already a lap down after an hour and trailed home 11th three laps down after encountering an undisclosed problem that may or may not have been linked to the first corner biff.

“FP3 and qualifying showed we had a podium car,” said Cadillac Racing team manager Stephen Mitas. “If we’d had the same car today, I think that result would have been possible, so it is an opportunity missed.”

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

After its first corner altercation with the #7 Toyota, Cadillac had a one-minute stop-go and ended up three laps down