Why the Fuji 6 Hours fallout should be of concern for WEC

If you went to bed on Sunday night believing the result of the Fuji 6 Hours was set in stone, I can only apologise. I did, too, though compared with most of you reading this I’d have hit the hay a lot earlier given the time difference for me in Japan. I didn’t learn that the fifth-placed Peugeot had been demoted to 10th until I got up on Monday morning.

There were other changes, too, further down the result sheet of last weekend’s penultimate round of the World Endurance Championship, outside of the points-paying positions that came out hours after the finish of the race and well past my bedtime. The stewards’ bulletin revealing the drive-through converted to a 53s time penalty for a safety car infringement by the #94 Peugeot driven by Stoffel Vandoorne, Loic Duval and Malthe Jakobsen was date stamped 23:24.

I can’t tell you when it was published, but I’m pretty sure I was at least in bed, if not asleep, by then. The official results seem to have been posted at 00:02 local time on Tuesday morning. I reckon I was definitely in the land of nod by then.

What I can say, however, is that the infraction came at 14:41, so that was during the final of the three safety cars of the race. Or to put it another way, more than two hours before the chequered flag.

Should we really be getting upset that the final results from the penultimate round of this year’s WEC came out so late? No, but the time it took for potential misdemeanours in the pits or out on track to be assessed and penalties awarded or otherwise at Fuji was definitely a cause for concern.

But perhaps it was an inevitable consequence of the most chaotic WEC race I can remember in all my years covering the championship in its current guise - and I celebrated my centenary along with the series in Japan. Chaotic in sportscar racing often means lots of yellow flag neutralisations, safety cars of the real and virtual kind, the VSC, and Full Course Yellows. The more of those you have, the more important it is for incidents on track and pitlane violations to be dealt with quickly.

Gary says it is concerning how long it took for penalties to be awarded at Fuji over the weekend

Photo by: Andreas Beil

Take the #6 Penske Porsche 963 LMDh that finished third in the hands of Laurens Vanthoor and Kevin Estre. Notification of a penalty for a pitstop infraction came just as Estre was passing Charles Milesi in the winning Alpine A424 LMDh for P2.

The five-second hold the car had to take at its final pitstop almost certainly robbed it of a shot at victory. Those five seconds ensured Vanthoor emerged from the pitstop cycle behind Mikkel Jenson in the #93 Peugeot, which he then spent the final hour unsuccessfully trying to pass.

Had he come out ahead of the Peugeot Jensen shared with Paul di Resta and Jean-Eric Vergne, there is every reason to believe that he would have taken the fight to the Alpine. Estre had proved the Porsche was quicker than the French car in the penultimate hour, and besides, his team-mate had four new tyres under him whereas Milesi had just the two fresh Michelins.

Clearly the workload for the stewards was ultra-high at Fuji: no fewer than 56 decisions emanated from their office during the race, a good percentage of them concerning on-track incidents that needed full, careful and therefore time-consuming consideration

So Porsche got it wrong in the pits when a mechanic started working on the car before the engine was switched off and was duly penalised. Nothing wrong with that, except the infringement didn’t come when Estre handed over to his team-mate for the run to the flag. Rather it happened three hours before, at the third round of stops that took place during the second of three safety cars at Fuji.

Given that there was another safety car in between the infraction taking place, the punishment being communicated to the team arguably proved crucial. The effect of those five seconds had they been taken before the final safety car would have not necessarily been nullified, but certainly mitigated in some way. The later a penalty comes, the less time a crew and its people on the pitwall have to overcome it with strategy, pure pace or just plain luck if the field closes up behind the safety car.

The Porsche wasn’t the only car to be compromised in this way. Take pity on Alessio Rovera in the #21 AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3. The Italian crossed the line in P1 in class only for the car he shared with Simon Mann and Francois Heriau to be docked five seconds. That relegated it to second in LMGT3, but the infringement - a mechanic remaining over the white line in the pit when the car powered away - had taken place late in hour four.

The 2025 Fuji 6 Hours was unlike any other race, especially with the high volume of penalties

Photo by: FIAWEC - DPPI

The Alpine in which Milesi, Ferdinand Habsburg and Paul-Loup Chatin triumphed on Sunday was also given two penalties that took an age to come, though crucially before the events of the final safety car that were so important in determining the result in Japan. Ferrari reckoned it was affected by the delays in dealing with the incidents - even before its pair of 499P LMHs were hit with time penalties post race. Alessandro Pier Guidi was penalised twice for track-limit transgressions, his employer appearing to question the time it took for the warnings to come.

Clearly the workload for the stewards was ultra-high at Fuji: no fewer than 56 decisions emanated from their office during the race, a good percentage of them concerning on-track incidents that needed full, careful and therefore time-consuming consideration.

That compares with 35 during the Austin WEC round earlier this month and 33 at Interlagos in July. For some reason my mind has conjured up an image of a long and winding queue of team managers lined up outside the stewards’ room like naughty schoolboys waiting to enter a headmaster’s study. It might not represent reality, but it’s indicative of the challenge the race officials faced.

I’m not sure what the answer is. More stewards, two sets perhaps? New procedures? Or, whisper it, something akin to the semi-automated technology in football? I don’t know the answer, only that one needs to be found.

Sure Fuji was an exception, but maybe over time it will come to be regarded as more of a norm. To understand how fine the margins are in WEC at the moment you only have to look at the fortunes of the Jota Cadillac squad last weekend. It had the fastest car, but once it got bogged down in the pack, the drivers of the two V-Series.R LMDhs couldn’t haul them back to the front. And the finer the margins the more incidents on track and infringements in the pitlane as everyone pushes the envelope.

More manufacturers are coming with the arrival of Genesis next year and McLaren and Ford the season after, we shouldn’t forget. And then there’s the Balance of Performance. Always a work in progress, it has been far from perfect this season, so if the organisers manage to finesse the process, the field is going to concertina yet further.

Here we are in a so-called golden age of sportscar racing, and yet we are faced with a situation where the outcome of races could be decided by the timing of the decisions in an office. That might well have been the case at Fuji on Sunday, but we will never know for sure.

The race was far too chaotic for that. Trying to follow it took it out of my ageing brain. No wonder I was in bed early.