Toyota’s New World Champions Finished a Lap Down

Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa are the 2026 World Endurance Championship drivers’ champions after finishing the 6 Hours of Monza 11th, a lap behind the winning Cadillac. The #8 Toyota TR010 Hybrid crew never needed a result on Sunday, because the only car that could still catch them was the sister #7, and it finished one place further back in 12th.

The title is the second world championship of Toyota Racing’s first season under that name, after the manufacturers’ crown was settled with a one-two in Barcelona last month. It is also the fifth drivers’ title for Buemi, the fourth for Hartley and the third for Hirakawa, who scored a Formula 1 point as a Haas stand-in earlier this autumn and flew to Italy for the decider instead of chasing another grand prix start.

The race itself belonged to someone else. The FIA WEC’s first report from the finish credits Jack Aitken, Sebastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber with the win in the #38 Cadillac Hertz Team Jota entry, the American brand’s first victory of the season, ahead of the #36 Alpine of Victor Martins and Jules Gounon and the #007 Aston Martin Valkyrie, which took the first podium of its WEC career. Alpine finished its WEC program with that second place. The provisional classification has the two Toyotas on 190 laps against the winner’s 191, with the #8 of Buemi, Hartley and Hirakawa 11th and the #7 of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries 12th, a little over 13 seconds behind it. Ten cars finished on the lead lap.

The outcome was never seriously in doubt once the lights went out. The #8 crew arrived at Monza with 114 points to the #7 crew’s 97, and the FIA WEC’s own preview spelled out that a top-five finish would seal it for the #8 whatever the #7 did. The #7 needed to make up 17 points in a single race, and after both cars qualified 15th and 16th of 17 Hypercars on Saturday, neither scenario looked likely. The series’ running report after four hours had the two Toyotas 10th and 11th, with the #7 just ahead of the #8, and noted that no incident had troubled either car.

The championship was built earlier in the year. The FIA WEC credits the #8 crew’s three wins, at Imola, Fuji and Barcelona, for the title, and Toyota’s pre-race notes put the TR010 Hybrid’s debut season at four race wins including Le Mans, two world championships and the Fuji home race. Toyota had won twice in its three previous WEC visits to Monza, in 2021 and 2023, and both of those wins went to Conway’s car.

Monza was also Conway’s last race before his retirement from full-time competition, his 86th start with the team since 2014. He leaves with 20 wins, two of them at Le Mans, and 47 podiums, and his teammate Kobayashi had ruled out team orders before the weekend, so there was no arrangement to hand the departing driver a result. Twelfth place, one spot behind the new champions, is how the record will show his final afternoon.

Toyota’s Lexus arm had a harder day in the LMGT3 class. The #87 Akkodis ASP RC F was leading in the third hour when Clemens Schmid was passed and then pulled off on the run to Parabolica with what the series called a terminal issue, and the class win went to the #92 The Bend Manthey Porsche. Jonny Edgar sealed the LMGT3 drivers’ title for TF Sport in the #33 Corvette, the first solo champion in the class since 2015. The Monza race was the RC F’s final WEC start.

The Toyota Report Take

Winning a world championship from 11th place is not how Toyota drew this up, and the team will not pretend otherwise. The TR010 Hybrid spent its first season winning the races that mattered and then arrived at a circuit it had not raced since 2023 to find the Balance of Performance had left it a second a lap short of the Ferraris, Cadillacs and Alpines. The points cushion from Imola, Fuji and Barcelona meant Sunday was a formality, and a formality is exactly what the team drove, keeping both cars clean while an Alpine and a Genesis retired from the Hypercar field around them.

The bigger picture is a clean sweep in year one of the Toyota Racing name, with both titles in the bag before the final flag. The question for 2027 is whether the gap that showed at Monza is a one-weekend quirk of the rulebook or the start of a trend, because Cadillac, Aston Martin and Peugeot all left Italy quicker than the champions, and Toyota has to build its next campaign without Conway in the #7.