The 6h of Spa-Francorchamps was a thrilling race spiced up by the typically unpredictable weather in the Ardennes. Toyota come on top for seemingly easy double victory. The Friday qualification indicated that Ferrari are able to match their pace but already on lap 11 they found themselves running 31st and 35th, for cars number 51 and 50, respectively. Ultimately, after 6 hours of racing, the leading Ferrari - #51, finished one minute and 14 seconds behind the winning Toyota #7 and 57 seconds behind the #8 Toyota which started the race second to last. Using publicly available race data provided by WEC and Al Kamel Systems, we can determine just how close Ferrari came to challenging Toyota for the victory.

STRATEGY

Ferrari chose to start the race on wet weather tires. Perhaps this looked like a risk worth taking before the race but it quickly turned into a nightmare due to the time it takes to change the tires and the extremely long tire warm up times on a cold and partially wet Spa-Francorchamps. Because of this strategy mistake the number 51 Ferrari visited the pits 8 times spending in total of 8:37.743. In comparison, the number 7 Toyota did 5 pit stops for a total of 6:35.774. The number 8 car did 6 pit stops with a total of 6:33.638. This alone indicates that if Ferrari could match Toyota in their strategy calls and pit stop efficiency they could have won the race by as much as 45 seconds. Even the number 50 Ferrari managed to accumulate 6:25.813 in the pits during their approximately four and a half hour long race, shortened by a crash on cold tires shortly after exiting the pit after their sixth visit.

Figure 1 shows the lap time distribution over the entire race for the two Toyotas and two Ferraris. Highlighted in yellow are the periods of Full Course Yellow (FCY) or Safety Car (SC). The triangles at the bottom of the figure show the in lap for a pit stop. The first two pit stops for Ferrari, on laps 9 and 10, were due to the strategy decision to start on wet weather tires. After that #51 Ferrari (filled red triangles) had to make two additional pit stops for fuel because a FCY was declared exactly when they were running out of fuel. This is, of course, a matter of luck which also struck the #8 Toyota and #50 Ferrari. The winning #7 Toyota was the only car of the top four which avoided that. The total time that #51 spent for these pit stops was 86 seconds, of those the drive through time is around 46s. If the dice had rolled differently this alone could have brought them significantly closer to contention for the victory.

RACE PACE

Friday saw the number 7 Toyota taking the pole with a lap time of 2:00.812. The two Ferrari cars followed 0.024 and 0.137 seconds behind, for #50 and #51, respectively. Due to a crash on cold tires we never saw a qualifying lap from #8 Toyota.

The fastest lap of the race was driven by Kamui Kobayashi in Toyota #7 – 2:02.327. In comparison the fastest the Ferraris could do was 2:04.694 for number 50 and 2:03.868 for number 51. The #8 Toyota’s fastest race lap was 2:05.284. This suggests that Toyota could have gone even faster during the race. It is truly remarkable that Kobayashi did this lap immediately after his last pit stop, where he changed only the left tires on the Toyota and took a full tank of fuel. He met no traffic during this lap, which would have helped a lot. It is still impressive that he managed to bring up to temperature his new tires during his out lap and carry on his pace with enough fuel for another 45 minutes of racing. Perhaps this indicates that staggering the tire change left to right is not a bad idea as this can help the drivers to put enough load and heat up the new tires faster. Irrelevant for Le Mans, thanks to the reintroduction of tire warmers, but important for the rest of the season.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of lap times and sector times for the leading Ferrari and Toyota cars. This excludes any laps under FCY and SC, all the pit-in and pit-out laps, as well as the top 3% slowest laps. The thin vertical lines show the median sector/lap time. This is the middle sector/lap when they are sorted by sector/lap time. Half of the race sectors/laps are faster than it, half are slower. Within each team both cars showed very similar pace and the comparison between cars #50 and #8 is very similar to the one shown in figure 2. Generally #51 shows a heavier tail towards slower sector times than #7 which, combined with the fastest race lap, indicates that Toyota was managing their pace and could have gone even faster. Over the whole race however, the Ferrari had nearly half a second per lap advantage over the Toyota (indicated by the offset between the two thin vertical lines in fig. 2). Most of this (3/4) was gained in the last sector and the rest in the second sector. The pace difference is likely due to different strategy for electric energy deployment as sectors 1 and 3 of Spa-Francorchamps require very similar chassy setup. The Ferrari also enjoys a slightly higher top speed, which for the entire lap peaks at the end of sector 1. This could indicate that when fully dialed in the Ferrari is more than a match for the Toyota, assuming that the latter did indeed show their true pace.

Probably! Figure 3 shows a comparison of the race pace maintained by the entire hypercar field. The race pace is represented by the median race lap. As before, all non-green flag laps and pit-in and pit-out laps are discarded. The fastest lap that a given car is capable of in race trim is a sum of the fastest sectors they did over the race. This is taken as 100%. Expressing the median race lap as a percentage of the fastest possible race and qualification laps gives us an idea how close a given car was run to the maximum pace they showed during the race/qualification. Toyota #7 show the largest margin between their fastest lap and their median lap- 4.4%. Comparison with the qualification laps shows the same although the variation over all the cars is smaller. To put this into perspective, if #7 was running the race in the same way #51 did, in terms of how close they stayed to their ultimate pace (only 2.7% drop), they would have been approximately 1.5 seconds per lap faster. So, the apparent pace advantage that Ferrari showed during the race is probably just that- apparent. The cars that run the race closest to their qualification pace were the #5 and #6 of team Porsche Penske Motorsport.

Ferrari pitted for slicks on laps 9 and 10, for cars #50 and #51 respectively. The two pit stops lasted 56 and 59 seconds but the damage this strategy mistake did was much greater due to the time it took them to bring their cold slicks up to speed.

Figure 4 shows the Sector and Lap times for the four laps following every pit stop done under green flag. Sadly, the publicly available data does not provide information on what type of tires were used, nor during which pit stops they were changed, but those pit stops show on Figure 4 as a continuously improving sector and lap times over the post-pit laps. For #51 those are pit stops 1, 3 and 5. For #7, because of their shorter tire warm-up periods, those are more difficult to spot but pit stops 3 and 4 very likely included tire change.

Right on top, shown in purple, is the disastrous first pit stop that #51 had to make. I estimate that the total time lost during the out lap and the consecutive three laps, with respect to the median pace #51 showed during the race, to be around 83 seconds (92 seconds for #50). It was a heroic effort from Antonio Giovinazzi and Nicklas Nielsen to drive those four laps on a cold, partially wet track on cold slicks without crashing. I encourage everybody to go to WEC TV and watch the onboard footage.

Ferrari AF Corse were not the only hypercar team to start on wet weather tires. In fact, almost half the hypercar lineup did so- #2 Cadillac, both Peugeots and the Hertz Team Jota #38 Porsche did the same. All of them lost significantly less time than the two Ferraris with #38 Porsche being the next slowest loosing 57 seconds. The Peugeots, for example, achieved their median pace by the end of the first lap after their pit stops loosing 8 and 11 seconds for cars #93 and #94, respectively. From Figure 4 it is visible that on every pit stop when tires were changed #51 loses time when compared to #7. Comparing their third pit stops #7 is faster during the out lap and at least through Sector 2 on the following lap. The Ferrari 499P is clearly very gentle on its tires. This will come in handy during the 24h of Le Mans, especially when the down side of this- the slow warm up time- is removed by reintroducing tire blankets.

CONCLUSION

#7 Toyota won because it ticked all the boxes, as is required in endurance racing. They made the right strategy calls, they had the pace, they had the reliability and they had some luck with the SC/FCY periods. Ferrari showed good pace although probably still not sufficient to mount a challenge. On all other fronts they have some catching up to do before becoming a plausible contenders for the victory.

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