Why the WEC's wait for a real victory fight goes on

Mike Conway repeatedly looked in his mirrors in the expectation that a rival or two might appear behind him some time soon. But, no one did. Not the sister Toyota, nor one or more of the World Endurance Championship LMP1 privateers.

The Briton was never challenged over the course of his opening double stint in Bahrain. And nor were team-mates Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez as they stroked to a one-lap win on a day when the hope of a real battle between the two factory hybrids and the independents quickly evaporated.

The #7 Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs led every lap of the Bahrain 8 Hours, reprising the total domination over six hours that its sister car had at Fuji in October.

No one expected any different in Japan thanks to a four-tenth gap between the two Toyotas on home ground under the new system of success handicaps, Rebellion's travails with its Michelin tyres and Ginetta's all-round newness.

This time, it seemed, there was the potential of a proper battle for victory involving both factory cars and the privateers.

But that hope all but disappeared inside the space of 500 or so metres of the start of round four of the 2019/20 WEC.

The pole-winning Rebellion started by Bruno Senna was nudged into a spin in Turn 2 by an out-of-control Charlie Robertson in the #5 Ginetta, which then came straight into the pits for body repairs. Meanwhile, the #8 Toyota with Sebastien Buemi aboard, sustained front end damage as a slightly delayed consequence of the same incident.

That explained why Conway, who with Lopez had qualified only fourth, behind the three cars delayed at the start, was more than four seconds up the road after the first lap of the 3.36-mile Bahrain International Circuit. And why the car in second place was an LMP2.

It also explained those furtive glances in his mirrors in search of the opposition as his margin continued to grow.

It would be wrong to say that the first-lap incident handed the race to Conway and his co-drivers on a plate, but it went a long way towards it. The Rebellion-Gibson R-13 that Senna shared with Gustavo Menezes and Norman Nato quickly made it up to second place and was closing on the winning Toyota, admittedly at a glacial rate, when a gearbox issue halted that progress in the third of the eight hours.

The #8 Toyota's day went, in Buemi's words, "from bad to worse"

Menezes found himself stuck in second gear, the car needing a new gearshift actuator. The loss of nearly six minutes dropped the car three laps off the lead, which is where it stayed to the end of the eight hours.

Senna wasn't happy with the behaviour of fellow front-row starter when the lights went green, claiming the Brit had "missed the memo" about the Bahrain event being an eight-hour race. He also suspected that the hit the Rebellion took from the Ginetta had a role to play in the team's gearbox woes.

"They guy completely destroyed our race," Senna raged afterwards. "I know he made a mistake, lost control of the car, but he completely took me out. He hit us on a wheel, which put a shock into the gearbox. I was having gearshift issues in that first stint.

"We last had this problem a year ago, and we haven't done anything different from usual apart from that shock at Turn 1."

The team, however, stressed that there can be no way of ever knowing if the impact did precipitate the gearbox problem.

Robertson, for his part, held his hand up and took the blame for the incident: "I just got on the power too early and lit up the tyres. My fault."

The Senna-Robertson clash definitely caused the first of the delays to hit the #8 Toyota Buemi shares with Brendon Hartley and Kazuki Nakajima, though only indirectly.

The Swiss took to the asphalt run-off in avoidance of the spinning Senna, but when he tried to come back onto the track there was a light contact with Paul di Resta in the LMP2 pole-winning United Autosports ORECA, which resulted in damage to the nose of the TS050.

"I had to come back [onto the track] because there was a gravel trap coming up," said Buemi. "I'm not going to blame him, but I think he could have left me a little bit more of a margin."

Buemi continued with the damaged front body until the first round of scheduled stops, but he still felt the effects of the first-lap incident until he got out of the car after a second stint on the same set of Michelins.

"I drove with the damage, so I destroyed the tyres basically, which made the second stint on them really hard," he explained afterwards.

Then the #8 Toyota's day went, in Buemi's words, "from bad to worse".

Nakajima had a clash with a GTE Am contender after climbing aboard early in the fourth hour. The team changed the rear body section damaged in the clash in the middle of his stint, but there was also damage to the floor that could not be repaired. The performance of the TS050 was blunted thereafter.

More time was lost at the start of the sixth hour when the #8 crew rolled the dice with a speculative strategic move. Buemi was put onto the softer compound of Michelin tyre in the hope of shaking things up. But his run had to be aborted after 15 laps, a significant blow when each LMP1 car had an allocation of only six and a half sets of tyres for qualifying and the race.

The #7 Toyota should have had the edge because it was running 2.51s worth of success penalties to the championship-leading #8 cars' 2.72s

"We were 1m15s behind, so we thought 'let's try the softs'," he explained. "We thought maybe it might work. Actually it didn't, and that was that."

There wasn't much to say about the winners' race.

All the normal platitudes applied: it was mistake-free, the drivers didn't put a foot wrong, the team did an excellent job and, of course, it was harder than it looked. The interesting thing about the #7 crew's race was they adopted the set-up from the sister car after Conway and Lopez had struggled in qualifying.

"We veered off on a set-up direction that wasn't really working," said Conway. "We swapped to what they had ended up with, which isn't that unusual, and the car was hooked up straight away."

The #7 Toyota should have had the edge because it was running 2.51s worth of success penalties to the championship-leading #8 cars' 2.72s. But Buemi reckoned he and his co-drivers might have been able to overcome that two-tenth deficit.

"[In qualifying] we definitely had the edge and it felt like we had the edge [in free practice], so I don't see why we shouldn't have had it in the race," he explained. "But sometimes it's not your day."

It wasn't Ginetta's day, either. The British constructor once again showed the pace of its AER-engined G60-LT-P1s, with Robertson and Hanley taking second on the grid and their team-mate in #5, Jordan King, setting fastest race lap.

But what it didn't do was mount any kind of consistent challenge to the Toyotas and Rebellion, though the #6 car in which former American Le Mans Series champion Chris Dyson made his belated international sportscar return did run second before the #8 Toyota and the #1 Rebellion caught back up.

Nor did Team LNT manage to chalk up any points. Both cars went out with internal gearbox failures, #5 out on the track in the fifth hour and #6 in the pits in the penultimate hour.

If Ginetta wasn't in the fight — and remember it was at Shanghai for the first couple of hours or so — Rebellion reckoned it would most definitely have vied for victory with Toyota but for the gearbox glitch.

"We could have won this race," reckoned Senna, whose mount was carrying 1.36s worth of handicaps rather than the 0.89s when it won in Shanghai. "We had the car, we had the pace."

Toyota didn't necessarily disagree with that.

"They were genuinely faster on average — though not by much — but we were faster in the pits," explained Toyota Motorsport GmbH technical director Pascal Vasselon, who reckoned Senna and co had the potential to catch up after the lap-one spin. "We were expecting to be slower than Rebellion in the race, but within the margin where we could recover if we had the perfect race.

"Without their stop for the gearshift, it would have been tight. We would have won marginally, really marginally."

But the fact remains that a close race is something for which the WEC is still waiting after the success handicaps kicked in at Fuji.

GTE PRO - Penalty spoils battle for victory

Aston Martin and Ferrari swapped places at each of the final three pitstops in Bahrain.

That was how tight it was between the best of the cars from the British and Italian marques in GTE Pro, although the grandstand finish that looked on the cards for much of the final half of the race never materialised.

The Aston Martin Vantage GTE driven by Marco Sorensen and Nicki Thiim ended up triumphing by an unrepresentative 13s margin after the chasing AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE shared by Davide Rigon and Miguel Molina was penalised. Molina had spun up the wheels for the briefest of moments as he left the pits for the final time, an offence as far as the WEC goes that is inevitably followed by a drive through.

Everyone in GTE Pro bar the race winners had a bad luck story

It was a lucky break for Aston.

Sorensen wasn't sure he could have kept his Vantage ahead through the final hour, at least not after the little bit of daylight he'd put between himself and Molina after the Ferrari was jumped in the pits disappeared during a full-course yellow.

"I'd certainly have done everything in my power to keep him behind," said Sorensen, "but it looked like the Ferraris were quicker in the night. I don't think we won this race on pace, but we tried to keep it as clean as possible and our boys did an amazing job in the pitstops."

Ferrari was convinced it would have won the race to the flag but for the penalty.

"We were stronger over the last 15 or 20 laps of a stint, so I think we have lost a victory," said Rigon. "Miguel spun the wheels for maybe half a revolution. The rules are the rules, but I think the stewards could have looked into the data a bit more."

Everyone in GTE Pro bar the race winners had a bad luck story at the weekend.

Alex Lynn and Maxime Martin ended up third in the second Vantage after the team split its strategies as usual and didn't pit its car in the mid-race FCY. The time lost pitting under green dropped them back from the sister car squabbling up front with the Rigon/Molina Ferrari.

James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi took fourth in the #51 Ferrari after the latter sustained a puncture shortly after pitting during that hour-four FCY. It was more bad luck for the 2017 champions, who lost the win last time out at Shanghai to a rideheight infringement and a shot at Silverstone when Pier Guidi was taking a drivethrough for a safety car infraction that was at that very moment lifted.

The Porsche 911 RSR was the fastest car in class at Bahrain, but the two factory cars ended up fifth and sixth after being delayed before the race reached half-distance.

Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen lost out with a failed damper that required changing, while Gianmaria Bruni and Richard Lietz sustained a puncture and bodywork damage as the result of an incorrectly seated wheel.

LMP2 - Di Resta sets up United domination

United Autosports notched up a first WEC win at only the fourth time of asking in its maiden LMP2 campaign in the series.

The Anglo-American team's ORECA-Gibson 07 led all but seven laps on the way to a victory that was set up over a first double stint by Paul di Resta before Phil Hanson and Filipe Albuquerque took their turns behind the wheel.

United led all but seven laps on the way to victory

Di Resta led by over half a minute when he handed over to Hanson at the end of his opening double stint after the two Jota-run cars that would finish second and third lost time on lap one.

Ho-Pin Tung spun the Jackie Chan DC Racing entry when he got on the kerbs trying to pass di Resta, delaying Anthony Davidson in the sister car run under the team's own name.

The lead of the Michelin-shod United car went up to as much as 50s with Hanson aboard, but a series of minor delays in the pits ensured that di Resta and co never quite looked home and dry until very the closing stages.

The team lost time with a sticking left rear wheel thanks to high brake temperatures and there were, said team boss Richard Dean, "a few other fumbles".

United eventually finished 21s up on the Jota ORECA Davidson shares with Antonio Felix da Costa and Roberto Gonzalez. Davidson passed and quickly dropped Tung in the Chan/DC car when he returned to the car for the final three stints with two new fresh Goodyears on the left-hand side, ending up 19s ahead of the car co-driven by Will Stevens and Gabriel Aubry.

G-Drive Racing took fourth on its first WEC appearance of the season. Jean-Eric Vergne, Job van Uitert and Roman Rusinov lost a shot at a podium when the first-named had to cut short his first double stint on the Michelin medium tyre.

That had a strategic knock-on in the fourth hour when the first FCY fell at the wrong time for the team boss when Rusinov was at the wheel of the TDS-run entry.

A late splash-and-dash for Vergne was the consequence of an aggressive strategy at the end to try to put the DC/Chan car under pressure.

GTE AM - Keating stint pushes Project 1 Porsche to victory

Ben Keating did most of the hard work for the Project 1 Porsche squad as it took its first GTE AM victory of 2019/20. The American did a three-hour stint at the beginning, coming out on top in the battle of the bronzes in hour one before hanging in among the pros after that.

The tactic of keeping Keating out on track beyond the two-hour, 20-minute minimum driving time for each crew's bronze-rated racer saved the car a pitstop and made the #57 Project 1 911 RSR difficult to beat.

Larry ten Voorde and Jeroen Bleekemolen, who subsequently cycled through the car, admitted that it was the boss who had done all the hard work.

Darren Turner, Ross Gunn and Paul Dalla Lana were best of the rest in the works-run Aston Martin Vantage GTE. They led the race on more than one occasion as the strategies of the class frontrunners diverged, but were never going to overcome the handicap of making eight stops to the winners' seven.

The Gulf Racing UK Porsche squad took its first WEC podium since 2017 with Ben Barker, Andrew Watson and Mike Wainwright driving.

The TF Sport Aston, class winner in Fuji and Shanghai, failed to add to its championship score, retiring with a fuel rail problem.