TOYOTA GAZOO Racing earned its first victory of the season on home ground in an epic 6 Hours of Fuji, the seventh round of the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC).
In front of an enthusiastic Japanese crowd, all three LMP1 manufacturers showed near identical pace, but the #6 TS050 HYBRID of Stéphane Sarrazin, Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi came out on top after an enthralling battle.
The #6 crossed the line just 1.439secs ahead of the #8 Audi, bringing TOYOTA’s 11th WEC win, its fourth in five years at Fuji and its first since Bahrain in November 2014. That result also lifts the #6 crew to second in the drivers’ World Championship, 23 points off the lead.
For quite a while Porsche drivers Timo Bernhard (DE), Brendon Hartley (NZ) and Mark Webber (AU) had chances to win the race; in the end they finished third. The reigning world champions had started from second place on the grid.
“I was the third driver in the car and had a pretty smooth stint,” commented Hartley. “When I got back into the car I had a nice fight with the Toyota. In the end he was in front and didn’t change tyres at the last pit stop. We did change tyres and were obviously hoping to benefit from the competition’s tyre degradation, but that didn’t happen and we remained third.”
Anthony Davidson, Sébastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima recorded their best result of a troubled season with fourth, within a minute of the winning sister car.
This year’s Le Mans winners and current championship leaders, Romain Dumas (FR), Neel Jani (CH) and Marc Lieb (DE), had started from sixth position. They were unhappy with the car’s balance for some of the time and came fifth. Because their closest rivals in the drivers’ championship took more points than them, their advantage has shrunk to 23 points.
In the manufacturers’ standings, Porsche (263 points) has increased its lead over Audi (204). Toyota follows with 174 points and there are two more six-hour races to come.
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