Monza Will Only Decide Which Toyota Wins the WEC Drivers’ Title

The World Endurance Championship’s season finale at Monza on November 8 can only decide which of Toyota’s two crews becomes drivers’ champion, because no other team can catch them.

The #8 TR010 Hybrid of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryō Hirakawa leads with 114 points, ahead of the #7 car of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries on 97. A six-hour race pays 25 points for a win plus one for pole, so the nearest rivals, BMW’s two crews on 75 points each, can reach 101 at most. Toyota had already wrapped up the manufacturers’ title, its eighth, by finishing one-two at Barcelona on October 18.

Those standings add the Barcelona result to the points the FIA WEC published before the race, when the #8 crew led the #7 by 89 to 79. Toyota’s Barcelona race report puts the gap at the same 17 points, and BMW’s own post-race release concedes that the drivers’ title now belongs to Toyota.

That leaves the #8 crew needing very little at Monza. Finishing fifth or better makes it champion no matter what the sister car does, and so does finishing anywhere ahead of the #7. The #7 crew has to win and have the #8 finish seventh or lower, or sixth if the #7 also takes the pole point, and its only other route is a second-place finish while the #8 fails to score at all.

The two crews got here by different paths. The #8 car won at Imola, Fuji and Barcelona, while the #7 car won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which pays double points, by 10.9 seconds over the #20 BMW. That was Toyota’s sixth Le Mans win and ended Ferrari’s run of victories there. BMW took a one-two at Spa and won again in São Paulo, and Ferrari won in Texas after Toyota broke down late in the race.

Barcelona showed how close the cars still are on raw pace, even though the result wasn’t. Genesis, in its first WEC season, took its first pole there by 0.170 seconds over Hirakawa’s #8, but the race started on a wet track and the two Toyotas pulled away once it dried. The #8 won by 0.583 seconds in Buemi’s 100th WEC start, despite a five-second penalty for a starting procedure offense, and Ferrari’s #50 finished third, 39.7 seconds back.

There is still something at stake behind Toyota. BMW leads Ferrari by 24 points in the fight for second in the manufacturers’ standings, 154 to 130, and BMW’s two crews are 22 points behind the #7 car for second in the drivers’ table. Monza became the finale after a reshuffled calendar replaced Qatar with Barcelona and dropped Bahrain, which had been the planned last round.

The Toyota Report Take

The drivers’ title is almost certainly the #8 crew’s, since a fifth-place finish is all it needs from a car that has won three races this year. The real question at Monza is whether Toyota lets its two cars race each other, and after a season in which the #7 won Le Mans and still trails by 17 points, it should.