The 6 Hours of Barcelona last weekend marked a milestone for the FIA World Endurance Championship manufacturers’ title, as it was the first time the crown was secured with a race to spare since 2023, when Toyota clinched the championship with a win on its home soil at Fuji. It represented Cologne-based Toyota’s first 1-2 finish of the season — though it was only the third time both of its cars had secured a podium after Imola and Le Mans — and the first since Bahrain the previous year.
The triumph pushed Toyota to 53 wins from 106 races, restoring its win rate to 50 percent, while the No. 8 crew of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa became the first back-to-back winners since the No. 51 Ferrari crew at Imola and Spa last year.
In his 100th WEC start, Buemi registered his 29th victory, with Hartley collecting his 26th and Hirakawa his ninth, marking the first time Hirakawa has secured consecutive wins.
Toyota Racing technical director David Floury again praised Hirakawa for his late-stint pace as he pulled clear of the sister No. 7 car, initially driven by Kamui Kobayashi and later Nyck de Vries, with the Barcelona result arriving soon after confirmation that the Japanese driver would not race in Formula 1 for Haas next season.
Floury told reporters: “Ryo was very strong at the end of the race, as we saw in qualifying, and as we saw in Fuji. I am very happy for him. It shows how strong he is as well because for him, Formula 1 would have been a strong opportunity, and to be able to bounce back and keep being that strong. It shows how good a driver he is.”
Although the manufacturers’ title is decided, the fight for second place continues between BMW and Ferrari, with 24 points separating the brands ahead of Monza’s season finale next month. Cadillac remains in mathematical contention for the runner-up spot, 36 points behind with 44 available.
Ferrari track operations chief Giuliano Salvi described the No. 50 499P’s third-place finish as “extremely solid” and also noted the satellite No. 83 AF Corse car’s season-best fifth place. “Perhaps we didn’t time the final pit stop perfectly, but fourth was within reach and we finished fifth,” Salvi said. “It’s good to be back in the top five after a few races where we weren’t in contention.”
Looking ahead to Monza, Salvi called the upcoming final race for the team “really important.” “We will be there for the final race of the current 499P, and today the 50 showed what we’re capable of. We’re quite confident we’ll be competitive there. We’re still fighting for second in the championship, in front of our home crowd, so based on how car 50 performed today, we need to replicate that with all three cars and go all out in front of our tifosi.”
BMW M Motorsport chief Andreas Roos lamented the end of his brand’s title hopes, after the two WRT BMW M Hybrid V8s could only finish seventh and 14th in Barcelona. “When you want to compete for a world championship, you cannot have races like this,” Roos said.
The squad recognized it did not possess the pace to challenge Toyota, so it attempted a strategic gamble with the No. 20 car by becoming the sole team in the field not to pit during the second Virtual Safety Car near the end of the opening hour. The plan backfired, as tire pressures on No. 20 fell too low after the caution, forcing an immediate stop and incurring a 20-second sanction.
WRT team principal Vincent Vosse credited the new Michelin wet-weather tires introduced for this round as a major factor, despite BMW being one of only two manufacturers (the other being Peugeot) to have previously tested the rubber at Sebring. “We don’t have a lot of experience with the tires, and we were too low. We made a mistake and we have to cope with it. With this pit stop, plus the drive-through, it ended Car 20’s race,” Vosse explained.
Roos suggested that even a clean race would likely have limited BMW’s result to fourth. The No. 15 car was ultimately hampered by a 10-second penalty for contact with the No. 38 Hertz Team JOTA Cadillac V-Series.R, which finished in fourth.
Despite the disappointment of not winning the title, Roos added: “If you had asked us at the start of the season whether we’d be where we are now, I would have signed off on it immediately.”
A slow puncture with ten minutes remaining deprived the No. 36 Signatech Alpine A424 of a top-six finish. The squad had experimented with an alternate strategy, pitting earlier to split its final two stints evenly, but ended up losing important time by exiting the pits just ahead of the leader Toyota and yielding to blue flags.
After the puncture stop, Victor Martins climbed to ninth but overtook Marco Sorensen’s Heart of Racing Aston Martin Valkyrie with two laps to go. “A top-five would have been a great result for the team, but sometimes in motorsport you don’t control all the factors,” Martins’ co-driver Jules Gounon told Sportscar365. “We were stuck on fresh tires behind the Toyota before it pitted, so that somewhat ruined the strategy.”
Peugeot team principal Emmanuel Esnault was magnanimous about the French squad’s Barcelona showing as its two 9X8s finished 12th and 13th, despite Paul di Resta delivering a competitive opening hour aboard No. 93 in the wet. “It went as expected,” Esnault told Sportscar365. “We knew rain would help us, and it did, but once it dried, we returned to the pace we showed at the start of the weekend.”
Esnault added that the standout moment for the squad was Hypercar rookie Alex Quinn’s performance in the closing stint aboard No. 93. “He did an incredible job for his very first race with us,” Esnault said. “He’s made no missteps at all. It reinforces our decision.”
Aston Martin’s No. 007 Valkyrie was the only Hypercar retirement due to an electrical issue, following an early off by Harry Tincknell, who suggested that Barcelona’s track layout contributed to a subdued showing for the British marque as sister No. 009 finished with two points in ninth.
Tincknell reflected: “It’s a shame. On Friday we were optimistic that we could be competitive in both wet and dry conditions. But we’ve hovered around the edge of the top ten, not much faster overall on this track. There’s a lot of combined traction zones and exits that this car doesn’t excel at.”
In LMGT3, Manthey secured its 25th WEC victory across GTE-Pro and LMGT3, its first since Le Mans last year and Porsche’s first win in any class since Circuit of The Americas last year, ending a lengthy winless run. It extends Porsche’s record of winning a race in every year of the WEC.
Richard Lietz, targeting his 100th race next month at Monza, claimed his 15th WEC win and fifth in LMGT3, with both he and Riccardo Pera—now a four-time winner—part of Manthey’s Le Mans-winning lineup from last year.
Yasser Shahin meanwhile claimed his third win and his first since Le Mans 2024, victory that came alongside Lietz and Morris Schuring.
Shahin was also named the Goodyear Wingfoot winner, edging out Salih Yoluc (Racing Team Turkey), Parker Thompson (Team WRT) and Thomas Fleming (Garage 59) in a fan vote on social media.
To highlight the dominance shown by both the No. 8 Toyota and the No. 92 Porsche, the two winning cars led 350 of the 381 laps they contested, equal to 91.9 percent— the highest percentage of laps led by all class winners combined on record.
Seven different teams have taken LMGT3 wins this year, setting a new WEC record for any GT class. The previous two LMGT3 seasons had six distinct winners, as did GTE-Pro in 2016 and the 2018-19 “super season.”
Dan Harper remarked that he would have missed an LMGT3 podium in the No. 69 WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO he shared with Anthony McIntosh and Parker Thompson if the race had extended another lap due to energy constraints. He slipped to third behind Marvin Kirchhoefer’s No. 10 Garage 59 McLaren 720S GT3 Evo with ten minutes remaining and finished just 0.256 seconds ahead of the No. 34 TF Sport Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R.
Harper told Sportscar365: “We expected the McLaren would overtake us because we needed to conserve energy to finish. There might have been only one megajoule left, so I don’t think I’d have reached Turn 1 while pushing. I gave it my all, but I had to manage fuel, which complicated the minimum tire pressure situation, so I was juggling a lot. It was a lot of fun.”
Ben Keating described the Barcelona race as “not the one we wanted” for the LMGT3-leading No. 33 Corvette, which finished seventh. The squad lost time by delaying its wets-to-slicks switch as nearby pit boxes were changing tires, while Jonny Edgar also received a ten-second penalty for contact.
Edgar’s championship lead was trimmed from 24 to 18 points by the race-winning No. 92 Manthey Porsche 911 GT3 R Evo. Keating told Sportscar365: “Seventh is a lot better than eleventh—we picked up some points. We hoped the No. 69 BMW wouldn’t make it on fuel, as a couple more positions would have given us more points.”
The No. 88 Proton Competition Ford Mustang GT3 EVO was disqualified after running out of fuel on the cooldown lap, having initially finished ninth. That capped a weekend to forget for Ford, as the sister No. 77 car also ran dry on the final lap.
Additionally, the No. 58 Garage 59 McLaren received a post-race 44-second time penalty for ignoring a black-and-orange flag, depriving it of a point that it would have gained from the No. 88 disqualification, leaving it 11th.
Those issues promoted the Fuji-winning No. 32 WRT BMW to a single point for tenth as Darren Leung returned to Barcelona after contesting the Portimao GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS Endurance Cup finale the previous evening.
Leung said he enjoyed the weekend despite the logistical hurdles of moving between venues. “I was surprised by the amount of pressure I felt with the FP3 and qualifying timing in Barcelona,” he explained. “I had half an hour on track and then I was in the car for qualifying. Then the nine-hour journey from Faro to Barcelona on Saturday night really amplified the challenge. It was definitely tough. I loved doing it and I’d consider doing it again, though not every weekend.”
WEC organizers reported a three-day crowd of 55,511 for the inaugural 6H Barcelona. While that figure is respectable for a stand-in event, it also marked the season’s lowest attendance, around 14,000 fans fewer than September’s Lone Star Le Mans at the Circuit of The Americas.
The WEC season will conclude with the 6 Hours of Monza on Nov. 6-8 as the championship heads to Italy for the first time since 2023.
