Toyota’s Title Deciders Will Start Monza From 15th and 16th

Toyota’s two TR010 Hybrids qualified 15th and 16th of 17 Hypercars for Sunday’s 6 Hours of Monza, the race that decides which of them wins the World Endurance Championship drivers’ title. Neither car made the ten-car Hyperpole shootout, and only one BMW will line up behind them.

The #8 car of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa, which leads the standings by 17 points and needs only a top-five finish to clinch, set a best lap of 1 minute 34.734 seconds in the qualifying session, 1.334 seconds off the fastest time. The #7 car of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries, the only crew that can still take the title from its teammates, was a further 0.331 seconds back at 1:35.065. The same afternoon brought Lexus its best news of the weekend, because the #78 Akkodis ASP RC F took pole position in the LMGT3 class.

The positions come from the official FIA WEC timing sheets for the Saturday afternoon sessions. Antonio Fuoco topped qualifying in the #50 Ferrari AF Corse 499P at 1:33.400, then took pole in Hyperpole with a 1:33.364 that beat Mathieu Jaminet’s #19 Genesis Magma Racing entry by 0.096 seconds. The #83 AF Corse Ferrari, the #51 works Ferrari and the #38 Cadillac Hertz Team Jota car filled out the top five in the first session, and the cutoff for Hyperpole fell at 1:34.364, almost four tenths quicker than the best Toyota managed. Toyota Racing had not published its own qualifying report by the time this story was written.

The grid is in line with the pace Toyota showed on Friday, when the cars were 12th and 17th in a wet practice and Hartley said rivals who had tested at Monza looked "a step ahead." Toyota last raced at the circuit in 2023, and the team’s drivers spent much of Friday asking for dry running to measure the gap. Saturday gave them the dry track, and the gap turned out to be more than a second over a lap of about 1 minute 34 seconds.

The arithmetic has not changed. The team’s own preview spelled out that the #8 crew clinches with fifth place or better, and that the #7 crew has to win or finish second and hope the #8 falls outside the top five at the same time. Toyota already holds the manufacturers’ championship after its one-two in Barcelona, so Sunday is about which three drivers get the trophy and about sending Conway, who is retiring from full-time racing after this event, out with a result.

The Lexus story went the other way. In the first LMGT3 session the two Akkodis ASP RC Fs were sixth and eighth, with the #87 at 1:50.147 and the #78 at 1:50.356, both inside the ten that progressed to Hyperpole. In the shootout Hadrien David put the #78 on pole with a 1:47.523, just 0.014 seconds ahead of Jonny Edgar in the #33 TF Sport Corvette. FIA WEC notes that Edgar can become the first sole LMGT3 drivers’ champion since 2015 on Sunday. The #78 Lexus also took pole at Spa in May with David at the wheel and finished second at Le Mans in June, the brand’s first podium there.

The race starts at 11 am Central European Time on Sunday, November 8, which is 5 am Eastern, and runs six hours.

The Toyota Report Take

Starting 15th and 16th is not the way a championship team wants to open its title decider, but the WEC’s Balance of Performance has a way of making qualifying pace and race pace two different things, and a six-hour race at Monza will see the field cycle through several pit stops and almost certainly a safety car or two. What the #8 crew needs is to stay on the lead lap and out of trouble, because fifth place is a long way below the Ferraris and Genesis cars that will contest the win. The real risk is a first-lap incident in a pack of 17 Hypercars arriving at the first chicane together, and starting that far back puts both Toyotas in the thick of it.

Lexus, meanwhile, has quietly built the strongest GT3 season in its short WEC history, with a Spa pole, a Le Mans podium and now the final pole of the year. The RC F GT3 is in its last full season before the GR GT3 arrives, and a class win at Monza would be a fitting way to retire a car that has outlived the road coupe it was built to promote.