Six crews, 21 points and three rounds to settle the WEC
A hydraulic failure 11 minutes from the end handed the #50 Ferrari a win nobody expected, and flipped the 2026 WEC championship on its head.
Six crews from three manufacturers are now covered by 21 points at the top of the World Endurance Championship, and the two cars that arrived at the Circuit of the Americas leading it both left with nothing. That is the real result of the Lone Star Le Mans, and it did not go the way the championship table suggests.
In this article
Toyota and BMW both left Austin empty handed
The No. 7 Toyota was leading with eleven minutes to go when a hydraulic failure ended its race. The No. 20 BMW of Robin Frijns, Rene Rast and Sheldon van der Linde, level with the Toyota crew at the head of the drivers’ standings before the weekend, finished twelfth and out of the points. Neither of the two title-leading cars scored.
What makes that strange is that the standings barely moved. Frijns, Rast and van der Linde are still tied with Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Nyck de Vries on 75 points. Both crews took zero, so both stayed exactly where they were, and the pursuers gained less than they should have.
Toyota even extended its manufacturers’ lead over BMW from five points to nine, 140 against 131, on an afternoon when its lead car retired from the front. That happened because the No. 8 Toyota of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa still salvaged sixth, and because BMW’s best finisher was the No. 15 in eighth. Ferrari, on 114, closed to within 17 of BMW.
The failure Toyota’s technical director had not seen before
De Vries described a car that gave him a warning he could not read. “The lap prior I started hearing and feeling a few odd things but wasn’t thinking too much at the time,” he said. “And then coming out of Turn 9 I lost the power steering and picked up a hydraulic alarm and you lose the power steering and the gear shifts and that was it.”
Technical director David Floury confirmed the team had never encountered this particular hydraulic problem before, which is the part that should worry Toyota most. A known failure can be managed. An unknown one cannot be planned around in the three weeks before Fuji.
It was not the only thing that went wrong. The No. 8 took a drive-through for speeding in the pit lane, and Floury would not be drawn on the cause. “Whatever the cause is, we shouldn’t have this issue,” he said. His summary of the day was blunt: “When you fight for a championship you need to have everything perfect and today we had a problem with car No. 8 which led to a drive-through and a problem on car No. 7 which led to retiring the car so we cannot be happy.”
Toyota has still never won at the Circuit of the Americas. It is one of only four circuits where the manufacturer has never won in the World Endurance Championship, and this was the closest it has come.
BMW had no pace, which is the harder problem to fix
Toyota’s afternoon was ruined by a component. BMW’s was ruined by the stopwatch, and that is worse.
The team arrived in Texas with its drivers leading the championship and momentum behind it after winning at Sao Paulo, its second victory of the season. At COTA it had nothing. The No. 20 finished twelfth, the last classified Hypercar, and the No. 15 of Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor could manage only eighth.
A mechanical failure is bad luck that can be engineered out. A car that simply does not work at a circuit is a question about the package, and BMW has three races to answer it before the title is decided.
Ferrari won the race with the wrong car
Ferrari’s afternoon carried its own asterisk. The winning No. 50 of Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina and Nicklas Nielsen was not the crew carrying Ferrari’s title hopes. That is the No. 51 of Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi, which took pole position on Saturday and finished eleventh on Sunday, outside the points.
The gap between the two Ferraris in the drivers’ table is now four points, 58 against 54, so the win has effectively given Ferrari two crews in the fight rather than one clear challenger. In a championship this tight that is not obviously an advantage.
Behind the winner, the No. 38 Hertz Team JOTA Cadillac of Jack Aitken, Earl Bamber and Sebastien Bourdais took second for back to back podiums, and the No. 35 Alpine was third after a five second penalty for an unsafe release dropped it from second. It is Alpine’s first podium of what is its final WEC season. The full race report is here.
Fuji, Barcelona and Monza to settle it
Three rounds remain. The 6 Hours of Fuji comes first on 27 September, then the 6 Hours of Barcelona on 18 October, and the season ends with the 6 Hours of Monza on 8 November. Barcelona and Monza are both replacements for the cancelled Qatar and Bahrain rounds, which also removed the bonus points those events would have carried.
That matters for anyone trying to recover ground. There are fewer points left in this championship than the original calendar promised, and the six crews inside 21 points are all chasing the same shrinking pot.
Our view: Toyota leads, and that is the uncomfortable part
Toyota goes to Fuji leading both championships and looking less secure than it did on Saturday. Its reliability record now has two chapters it would rather not have written, Sao Paulo and Austin, and the second one came with an engineer saying he had never seen the failure before.
Fuji is Toyota’s home race and a circuit it knows better than anyone. If the car is right there, this reads as a bad afternoon in a strong season. If something goes wrong again, the pattern becomes the story, and BMW and Ferrari are close enough that a third failure would settle the title without either of them having to beat Toyota on merit.
