Alonso edges closer to WEC crown at Spa
Toyota’s WEC leaders Alonso, Buemi and Nakajima lucked in when the sister car hit problems – but also had to deal with the Belgian climate
This one had it all. Snow, hail and sleet, multiple safety cars, a rare mistake from Fernando Alonso, and an equally rare
(at least in the context of the 2018-19 World Endurance Championship) technical problem for one of the Toyotas. That was the most significant event of last weekend’s Spa 6 Hours, because it handed Alonso and team-mates Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima race victory and a firm grip on the title.
Their rivals on the other side of the Toyota garage – Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez – needed a victory in the penultimate round of the superseason to have a realistic chance of taking the title at the Le Mans 24 Hours WEC finale next month. They looked on course do just that, only for technical gremlins to strike late in the third hour when the #7 TS050 HYBRID was more than 50 seconds up the road.
An issue with a sensor in the hybrid system resulted in a four-lap stay in the garage, which dropped the car outside the top 20. The victory was gone and the eventual sixth-place finish for Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez means they have now fallen 31 points behind the sister car. With just 39 points up for grabs at Le Mans in June, Alonso and his co-drivers will only have to finish seventh, even if their rivals take the 38 points for the win and the one for pole position.
It was, said Alonso, a “big hit in terms of points”. It was also another example of the Belgian bad luck that has blighted the #7 crew. Last year they lost pole position to what was essentially a paperwork issue, started more than a lap down and then Kobayashi, with the faster car under him, had to hold station behind the sister car when team orders were called at the final pitstop.
This time they kept the pole claimed by Kobayashi and Conway with times the better part of half a second up on their opposite numbers, Nakajima and Buemi. They didn’t keep the lead for very long when the snow came, but the evidence of the first three hours suggested that they did have the faster car in the dry, and
Buemi was happy to admit that.
Conway converted the pole into the lead of the race and gained time when the first snow flurry began after the cars had completed barely two laps. The #8 crew made their
decision to pit for grooved rubber late, which meant the tyres weren’t ready when Buemi arrived at his stall, losing him 20 seconds and a position to the #3 Rebelliongibson R-13 started by Thomas Laurent.
The safety car that followed meant
Buemi quickly made up that time. On a wet track he was able to move into the lead inside a couple of laps and pull away into a seven-second lead before the safety car was deployed again.
Buemi needed fuel while the pits remained closed, which meant he had to make an emergency pitstop for five seconds of fuel. Worse still, a radio problem meant he made his pitstop proper one lap later than Conway after the race had gone green, dropping him just over half a minute behind his British team-mate.
The gap between the two Toyotas had gone out to more than 40 seconds by the time Buemi made it up to second. It was never less than that — and briefly went up to nearly a minute — before the problems struck the #7 car after Kobayashi had taken over. (Alonso’s uncharacteristic spin at Pouhon had cost him little, coming as it did just before a virtual safety car).
The two Toyotas went into the Spa race with differing downforce levels on the Le Mans-spec body kits they were running in preparation for the big one in June.
The drivers of the #8 car opted for more downforce, which explained Buemi’s pace in the wet after the first restart and why #7 was in the ascendency when the track dried. How the differing strategies would have played out when the snow returned in the latter stages of the race can only be a matter of conjecture.
It is fact, however, that the drivers of the #7 car are no longer realistically in the title hunt as the series heads for the second Le Mans of the superseason. That’s bad news for the WEC, but the pace of the privateers was definitely good news – they were closer than ever before over the course of the superseason.
The top two non-hybrid cars, one each from the Rebellion and SMP teams, were only a lap down on the winning Toyota when the race was brought to an end 11 minutes early as the snow returned harder than ever. The gap would have been bigger but for the proliferation of yellows – four full safety cars and two of the virtual kind – but the independents were in a position to capitalise when a Toyota faltered.
Toyota even failed to top the times in one of the sessions of free practice. SMP’S pair of Aer-powered BR Engineering BR1S were 1-2 in opening free practice, and the Toyota drivers suggested that even if they had pushed they might not have been able to match the times of the Dallara-built contender on the green track.
SMP and Rebellion both ran in highdownforce configuration at Spa, the latter switching to that spec after trying its new Le Mans bodykit in opening free practice. That undoubtedly had some bearing on the reduced gap. Low downforce wasn’t what was required on a cold and wet track.
The #3 Rebellion that Laurent shared with Gustavo Menezes and Nathanael Berthon took second spot just ahead of the best SMP BR1 driven by team newcomer Stoffel Vandoorne, Vitaly Petrov and Mikhail Aleshin. There wasn’t too much between a pair of cars that swapped positions multiple times through this topsy-turvy race. A drivethrough penalty incurred by Vandoorne – who completed an opening stint of two hours and 45 minutes – for an infraction during a virtual safety car had no bearing on the result, but a gearbox glitch for the BR1 did.
Petrov lost the use of fifth and sixth gears with a couple of hours to go. That meant he was powerless to resist Laurent after the penultimate restart, though the stop-start climax to the race meant Aleshin was only just over six seconds behind at the end.
The second of the BRES driven by Sergey Sirotkin, Egor Orudzhev and Stephane Sarrazin came home fourth after losing its front-right wheel in the third hour. The #1 Rebellion shared by Neel Jani, Andre Lotterer and Bruno Senna had a couple of spins, though fifth place, a lap down on the car ahead, could largely be explained by a series of early strategical errors, not helped by a malfunctioning radio and bad luck behind the safety car.
It would still be a push to say that SMP and Rebellion will be able to mount any kind of real challenge the TS050S at
Le Mans next month. The race is going to be about Toyota, even if there isn’t a true battle for the drivers’ title.
“It’s looking like the championship is gone,” said Conway. “The sister car would more or less not have to not finish Le Mans, which is not something we want. But we will fight to the end.”