What to look out for in WEC 2025

Cadillac to deliver on its potential

Cadillac has been the big underachiever in the World Endurance Championship over the past two seasons. It has just one podium, notched up at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2023, to show for its efforts. That’s a pretty paltry haul given how quick its V-Series.R LMDh has been. Don’t forget that the car won the inaugural GTP title in the 2023 IMSA SportsCar Championship.

The Caddy was the fourth quickest contender in Hypercar last season, and probably higher up the pecking order in qualifying - witness Alex Lynn’s run of top fours between Spa and his pole in Fuji. Yet Ganassi’s solo full-season entry ended up with only a couple of fourths, one of which at Qatar was lost to a homologation infringement.

Now with two cars run by the British Jota squad things will surely change. As Earl Bamber, who has shifted over to the former Porsche customer squad with Caddy, points out, Porsche, Toyota and Ferrari all had problems getting two cars through the races cleanly on a consistent basis.

“I don’t think the results were representative of the pace of the car,” says Bamber, who this year shares with Sebastien Bourdais and Jenson Button. “We didn’t always execute; we probably failed to do so in half the races. Because the championship is so competitive, if you have one small issue, you can’t just drive through to the front. We weren’t the only ones to have problems, but we only had one car.”

Having two cars for the first time will also help drive forward development. As will Bamber’s participation in the full IMSA series with Action Express Racing bar the Laguna Seca round that clashes with the Spa WEC round in May.

“I think a WEC driver doing the full season in IMSA can be really beneficial,” explains Bamber. “All the data is shared between Cadillac’s teams, but by jumping between the programmes I will be able to humanise all the numbers and squiggly lines. Having that kind of direct input can only drive us forward as a team at Jota but also the whole global programme.”

Jota has a habit of excelling in the races, always has through P2 into its ascent to the Hypercar class with the Porsche 963 LMDh, so everything points to it being able to turn the raw pace of the Caddy into concrete results.

Can it put the V-Series.R into the winner’s circle in the WEC? That can’t be said for sure, but the team didn’t take long to start competing at the sharp end with the Porsche.

The #6 Porsche appears even stronger than its title-winning campaign

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An even stronger #6 Porsche

The title-winning Porsche had amazing consistency over the course of last season. Expect more of the same, and perhaps then some, this time around.

When Kevin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor have a team-mate, as in Qatar this weekend, it will be Matt Campbell, who will swap over Porsche Penske Motorsport IMSA squad for the longer races and at least Imola of the six-hour events. He replaces Andre Lotterer, who wasn’t always at the same level as his co-drivers last season, nowhere more so than at Le Mans.

But there are other reasons why Estre and Vanthoor might be even stronger this year. PPM believes there are advantages in running six hours with two drivers: more seat time and less compromise on set-up are the main ones. Could it be Porsche’s trump card or a disadvantage when it comes to the Le Mans 24 Hours? Only time will tell.

There’s another factor that could push Estre and Vanthoor onwards and upwards. They had a new engineering crew last year, so drivers and pitwall boffins were still getting to know each other as the season progressed. Estre reckons that with a year building the all-important driver-engineer relationship under their belts things can only get better.

The Qatar surface posed a unique track to master 12 months ago

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The strange challenge of the Qatar surface

The debut of the World Endurance Championship at the Losail International Circuit in Qatar produced a strange affair last year. Its new high-grip but non-abrasive surface caused all sorts of problems on tyre warm-up. Porsche proved the master of this task. Which largely explains why it dominated proceedings in the desert.

A coarser surface puts more energy into the rubber, allowing a driver to push harder sooner. Push too hard on the fine Qatar asphalt, which is new again for 2025 though the drivers reckon they can’t tell the difference, and there is a risk of what Hypercar tyre supplier Michelin calls “micro-sliding”. That in turn results in a graining, which seriously compromises the life of the tyre.

Porsche had an edge on tyre warm-up with its 963 LMDh pretty much throughout 2024. There has been the suggestion that the evo joker performance update on its front suspension for this year has resulted in a step backwards in this respect, but it didn’t look like it as the PPM team raced to a second straight Daytona 24 Hours victory in January. The car was the quickest thing in the place during the night when temperatures were at their lowest.

Tyre management will be doubly key over the 10 or so hours of the Qatar 1812Km. The race starts in the day and finishes at night, with a resulting large swing in track temperatures. Not everyone used both Michelin compounds available in 2024 - Porsche, for example, only ran on the hard - but there could be time to be had for a car making the switch to the medium at exactly the right time.

Toyota is facing mounting opposition having dominated the start of the Hypercar era

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Toyota without a performance advantage

Toyota finally lost the WEC drivers’ title after five straight triumphs last year, but it still had the fastest car across 2024 even if it wasn’t as consistently at the sharp end as Porsche. It is expecting any advantage to narrow or disappear this season, and for good reason. The GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar is entering its fifth season of competition and the gains to be made are reducing year on year.

“It’s going to be tougher than ever,” says Sebastien Buemi, who is once again teamed with Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa in the #8 entry. “Most of the manufacturers will be able to make much bigger steps than us.”

It needs to be pointed out Toyota has no evo joker performance upgrades for this year. They have to be applied for and are approved by the rulemakers according to need. The obvious conclusion to draw is that any developments would not be allowed to the fastest Hypercar in the WEC last year.

Buemi is expecting the WEC to be ever closer as the Balance of Performance does its job. He points out that this season the WEC is returning to the same tracks at the same time of year. That will make the job of the Automobile Club de l’Ouest and the FIA, which jointly write the rules for WEC, easier.

“It is going to be tighter than ever,” continues Buemi. “I expect everyone to be very close on performance over the full year. Then it’s going to come down to strategy, not making mistakes, having perfect pitstops and working on tyre degradation.”

They are all strengths of the Toyota Gazoo Racing team. It looks like the 3.37-mile Losail circuit isn’t the best for the GR010 even with a more favourable BoP than last year, but expect it to be in the mix even where it is lacking performance.

After a bumpy start to its new era, can Peugeot make a breakthrough in 2025?

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Peugeot finally coming good

Is this a big year for Peugeot after two and a half winless seasons after its return to the top of the sportscar tree? It has to be for a manufacturer with three Le Mans wins to its name.

“I don’t know if we have to win or not, but that is the target,” says Peugeot Sport technical director Olivier Jansonnie. “In 2024 the races were becoming closer and closer between the cars and the gaps are going to be even smaller in 2025.”

So close will the competition be in 2025 that, Jansonnie reckons, “any manufacturer can win races”. It will come down to execution: “No mistakes, no sporting penalties and strategy, and being on the right tyres at the right time and having low degradation.”

Jansonnie points out that the in-house Peugeot Sport team continued an upward trend in those departments last year. It owed its fourth-place finishes at Fuji and Bahrain (which became a podium after a post-race penalty for Ferrari) to its race game plan rather than outright pace.

Peugeot has made gains in performance over the winter as it better understands the 9X8 2024 introduced at last year’s Imola round in April. It has finally confirmed that it has taken a joker, relevant to the suspension, it says, for the new campaign.

BMW had pace in Daytona earlier this year which bodes well for the WEC season ahead

Photo by: Andreas Beil

BMW to be in the fight at the front

BMW was the marque on the move at the end of last year, notwithstanding losing out in the race for fourth place in the manufacturers’ standings to Alpine. One of the WRT-run M Hybrid V8 LMDhs was a genuine contender for victory at Fuji, whereas the Alpine A424 LMDh never was despite its impressive end-of-season pace.

Daytona proved that the upward trajectory at BMW has continued over the brief off-season, which included the introduction of an joker upgrade of the braking system. The M Hybrid V8 had the edge on speed over its rivals at the IMSA curtain-raiser in January, at least when the sun was up, and would probably have won the race but for a mounting issue on the nose of the quickest of its cars.

BMW has taken a leaf out of Porsche’s book, at least of sorts, for the new season. PPM has made much of its one-team approach and the free flow of information across the Atlantic between its WEC and IMSA programmes. The decision for Dries Vanthoor and Sheldon van der Linde to race for WRT in the WEC and Rahal in IMSA has been devised with the same end.

BMW believes it is already paying dividends at this early stage of the season. Daytona suggested it isn’t wrong.

New qualifying rule will counter advantage for lighter drivers

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Heavyweight drivers bidding for pole

The trend of the lightest driver being handed the baton for qualifying in Hypercar should become a thing of the past. Think the likes of Antonio Fuoco and Charles Milesi monopolising qualifying duties in their respective Ferrari and Alpine entries. A new rule has been introduced that will go a long way to removing the penalty carried by a heavier driver.

It will do so entirely in the first timed session and then in Hyperpole for the fastest 10 cars. Any driver weighing in under a 82kg - that’s just under 13 stone in old money — will have to carry ballast up to that figure. For the race the average weight of the two or three drivers in each crew will be calculated and if below the magic figure, extra kilos added above the car’s minimum laid down in the Balance of Performance.

The system mimics that introduced in LMP1 for 2015 and is widely regarded as common sense. It’s got to be good for the championship.

The Aston Martin Valkyrie lit up social media with the sound of its V12 in the Prologue

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And something to listen out for!

The normally-aspirated V8 powerplant in the Cadillac has provided a welcome relief to the farty turbos of the rest of the Hypercar field over the past two seasons. This year there is something even better - the 6.5-litre V12 developed by Cosworth in the back of the Aston Martin Valkyrie.

Sportscar racing has always been about diversity of engine noises. Think back to Group C in the 1980s, and Porsche flat-six turbos, the Mercedes twin-turbo V8 in the back of a line of Saubers and the unblown, big capacity Jaguar V12. The arrival of the Aston takes us back in that direction.

Aston’s LMH might not be at the sharp end of the grid to begin with, but it’s still a car to look out for. Or rather listen out for.

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The 2025 WEC season gets under way this week in Qatar

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images