At the circuit named after its founder and his son, the Prancing Horse handed victory to Toyota in an eventful 6 Hours of Imola
GARY WATKINS
HYPERCARLMGT3
Toyota triumphs in a World Endurance Championship race. Nothing unusual in that, of course. Yet the Japanese manufacturer didn’t so much win the Imola 6 Hours as Ferrari lost it. The home marque was in the ascendent up the road from its factory last Sunday, only to throw it away. When rain arrived it got its strategy spectacularly wrong and its sparring partner nailed it spot-on as Mike Conway, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi took an against-the-odds victory.
Deep into the fourth hour, Ferrari was sitting pretty in 1-2 at the top of the leaderboard, James Calado in the #51 Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar ahead of Miguel Molina in the #50 sister factory car. Just after the clock hit four hours, the two factory cars and the satellite customer entry also run by AF Corse were in the pits having wetweather tyres bolted on. The problem was that the rest of the Hypercar field had long since taken grooved rubber, the majority four laps earlier. Suddenly the trio of 499Ps were down in sixth, seventh and eighth, Calado in the best-placed of them a minute and a half down on race leader Kobayashi’s Toyota GR010 HYBRID LMH. The chance of victory for Ferrari in its back yard was gone.
It was a disastrous episode for Ferrari in front of a monster crowd at the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari – the three-day attendance was put at more than 73,000. It should have won this race easily, probably with a 1-2 result, perhaps even repeating the 1-2-3 of qualifying with the yellow independent car following, or in among the two red factory entries.
Antonio Fuoco, teamed with Molina and Nicklas Nielsen in #50, had been six tenths up on best-of-the-rest Kevin Estre in the Qatar-winning Porsche 963 LMDh during Hyperpole qualifying. Over the dry portion of the race, it kept a margin of superiority around the 3.05-mile track. Ferrari maintained its top-three block to the first round of stops, Nielsen leading Antonio Giovinazzi (in the #51 car shared with Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi) and Robert Kubica in the customer car that Robert Shwartzman had put second on the grid. The gap from first to fourth – the Porsche Penske Motorsport entry with Laurens Vanthoor at the wheel – was barely five seconds early on, before the Ferrari superiority was extended over t
