A bit of tweaking of the Balance of Performance resulted in a sense of foreboding among Toyota’s rivals ahead of last weekend’s World Endurance Championship finale. “Unless they do something wrong they are going to finish 1-2,” reckoned a driver from one of those competitors in advance of the cars hitting the track.
The Japanese manufacturer might not have notched up a podium in the first of the seven races of the 2025 campaign, but there was good reason for that pessimism. The helping hand Toyota received under the BoP, and the reverse that came the way of some of its rivals in the Hypercar class, arrived in time for a race that it has made its own over the years. The Bahrain International Circuit had hosted 13 WEC rounds before Saturday and Toyota had won 10 of them. More to the point, its GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar was unbeaten around the 3.63 miles of the Middle Eastern venue over both six and eight hours.
Toyota duly delivered the predicted 1-2 in the Bahrain 8 Hours, Mike Conway, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi in the #7 GR010 leading home the #8 driven by Brendon Hartley, Sebastien Buemi and Ryo Hirakawa. It was a result that both impacted the fight for championship honours and was influenced by it.
Given that Toyota had not had to clear any space in its trophy cabinet this year, it didn’t go to Bahrain with a chance of stealing the manufacturers’ prize away from Ferrari. Nor were either of its line-ups in the running to deprive the Ferrari #51 factory AF Corse crew of Antonio Giovinazzi, James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi of the drivers’ title. But two GR010s scoring the kind of big points that Porsche and Cadillac required to garner some end-of-season silverware worked in Ferrari’s favour.
Not that the Prancing Horse needed any favours. Its 499P LMH was the second fastest car on Saturday as it duly wrapped up the titles that were its to lose. Fourth position was more than enough for Giovinazzi, Calado and Pier Guidi, the last-named ceding position to the sister car of Nicklas Nielsen, Miguel Molina and Antonio Fuoco at the death to allow the drivers of #50 to move up to third in the final points and make it a Ferrari championship 1-2-3. Phil Hanson, Robert Kubica and Yifei Ye held onto the runner-up spot in the points in AF’s satellite entry with fifth place on a day that they weren’t a match for the factory cars.
Ferrari played the points game in Bahrain, but there was a period during which the 499P looked like a genuine contender for victory. Admittedly, it was a short period, but it opted not to push the boat out strategically last weekend. It was unique among the frontrunners in not switching fully from the hard to the medium-compound Michelin as the temperatures dropped after the sun went down.
One of Toyota’s biggest strengths has always been on tyre degradation, and no track stresses rubber like Bahrain and an abrasive surface incorporating an aggregate imported from Shropshire. Remarkably, it remains in place from the day the circuit was inaugurated way back in 2004. But on the hard tyre in the heat of the day the GR010 looked to have an equal in the 499P.
Giovinazzi challenged the Toyotas late in the second hour, passing Hartley for P2 and then moving in on race leader Conway before the second round of pitstops. It maintained position through to the first of the two safety cars that interrupted this race early in hour four, before its Japanese rival tightened its hold on the race as the temperatures cooled.
The Toyotas had started on three hards and a solitary medium on the front right to the Ferraris’ hards all round. By midway through hour five the GR010s were on four mediums, but the 499Ps retained the hard on left side of the car through to the chequered flag.
"It was probably impossible to beat Toyota here. They did an amazing race: they probably, not probably, they definitely deserved the win" Ferdinando Cannizzo
Ferrari decided that discretion was the better part of valour over the second half of a race it didn’t need to win. “There was no reason for us to risk anything with a dangerous strategy in terms of tyre choice, considering we were really strong on the mix,” said Ferdinando Cannizzo, Ferrari’s sportscar racing technical boss.
And why gamble, he suggested, when the prospect of Ferrari beating the Toyotas looked remote? “It was probably impossible to beat Toyota here,” he explained. “They did an amazing race: they probably, not probably, they definitely deserved the win.”
The fact that the #8 was able to recover to second after a drive-through penalty for overtaking under the yellow flags that preceded the first safety car proved that. Hartley had taken the lead at the first round of pitstops when Toyota Gazoo Racing split its strategies: he continued on the tyres on which he had started, while Conway got two new hards on the left.
The #8 Toyota was waved through again by de Vries after the first safety car, Buemi staying out front until Kobayashi got the undercut on fellow countryman Hirakawa midway through hour five as the car moved onto four mediums. Four laps later #8 was in the pits to take its drive-through.
The penalty dropped the car as low as ninth, before Hirakawa and then Hartley hauled it back into a more representative second with an hour to go. The final safety car made it look closer than it really was, de Vries bringing the car over the line 19s clear of Buemi after a final 32 minutes of green-flag running. The gap before the neutralisation has been more than 45s.
“We made a mistake - I blame myself for that - and they didn’t, so they deserved to win,” said Buemi, when asked whether this was a race he and his team-mates should have won. “Up to then it was close, just like it used to be. It’s a bit difficult to predict what would have happened.”
TGR Europe technical director David Floury reckoned it “would have been tight”, but it can only be conjecture on whether #8 would have been able to take advantage of the gamble to save tyres at the beginning of the race.
Bahrain is always about tyres and a bizarre scenario involving the black and round things on each corner of the car allowed Aston Martin to lead a WEC race for the first time with its Valkyrie LMH. Alex Riberas, who shared the #009 The Heart of Racing entry with Marco Sorensen and Roman De Angelis, had to change four tyres during the first VSC. With the car marginal on tyre pressures and the team facing the prospect of a penalty, there was no other choice. The fresh rubber played a part in his ability to propel the car from fifth to first inside five laps after the restart.
The enforced tyre change that helped facilitate Aston’s moment of glory, one brought to a premature end with a drive-through for a virtual safety car infringement, would also blunt its chances of improving on the season’s best result of fifth at Fuji in September. The best of the Valkyries in Bahrain was left short on rubber at the end, Sorensen bringing the car home seventh after being given a set of used tyres from its allocation for the run to the flag.
Aston wasn’t a genuine contender for victory in the way it had been in the Petit Le Mans IMSA SportsCar Championship curtain-closer at Road Atlanta last month. Porsche took the Stateside drivers’ crown with Matt Campbell and Mathieu Jaminet thanks to their third place together with Laurens Vanthoor behind the Valkyrie. Third was the minimum Vanthoor and Kevin Estre, again sharing with Campbell, needed in Bahrain, and that was only if #51 was down the back end of the top 10 or worse.
Porsche’s chance of taking one or both of the titles looked like a long shot in the run-up to Bahrain and became even longer on the release of the BoP: the 963 LMDh took a hit on both weight and power at a time when Toyota and Ferrari got a little bit of help in both departments. The 963 was now the heaviest car in the field, as well as the least powerful.
Another blow was a lock-up from Estre in qualifying, for the second race in a row, that left the #6 Porsche Penske Motorsport entry right at the back of the Hypercar grid. But as at Fuji, the car made progress up the field. It was running well inside the top 10 after the first safety car before going off-strategy with an early fifth stop.
"This race showed why the season was not so good for us" David Floury
That played havoc with the car’s track position, Campbell getting bottled up behind Paul di Resta in the #93 Peugeot 9X8 2024 LMH even before a 10s stop-and-hold for an unsafe release lost the car further time. A finishing position out of the points in 13th meant Vanthoor and Estre slipped to fourth in the final championship reckoning.
Cadillac was the other championship contender going into Bahrain, though its chances in the manufacturers’ standings and with Alex Lynn, Will Stevens and Norman Nato in the drivers’ classification were well into the realms of the mathematical. The #12 car made it home sixth, which the Jota team reckoned was a pretty good result given the 30bhp-plus hit the Caddy V-Series.R LMDh received under the BoP.
The 2025 Bahrain 8 Hours was a race in which Toyota did what it had to salvage something from a disastrous season when the cards fell in its favour at a kind of home from home. “We always manage to perform well on this track - that is a fact,” said Floury. “The other fact is that now the frontrunners are much better aligned in terms of power and weight. This race showed why the season was not so good for us.”
The same went for Ferrari: that’s doing exactly what it had to. There were things much more important than another WEC victory at stake last weekend.
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