WEC Prologue, what we learned: Toyota hot, Peugeot not

With the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Prologue over, the start of the season proper is just days away. As the teams pore over the data and attempt to work out roughly where they stand in comparison with their competition, let’s see what deductions we can make from the 12 hours of testing over the weekend.

It’s likely obvious to anyone who has looked at the results from any of the four sessions, or read one of MotorsportWeek.com’s articles over the weekend, that Toyota is still the team to beat in WEC. The cars clocked up the most laps of any team, let alone those in Hypercar, running faultlessly over all four sessions, and weren’t just quickest in three out of four — they were 1-2 in all but one.

Looking at the lap times from the fourth session, when most of the Hypercars dropped the sandbags — although there’s likely some remaining — and turned up the wick, it’s clear the Toyotas were the quickest cars, both over a single lap and long runs.

In some quick and dirty average lap time analysis, taking the teams’ longest runs from the fourth session discounting any lap times over two minutes, plus in and out laps, the #8 Toyota, driven at time by Ryo Hirakawa, was the only car to drop into the 1:49s, although only just. His teammate in the other car, Mike Conway, was next, just two tenths back on average.

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Next up was the #50 Ferrari, around half a second on average off Hirakawa. Another two tenths back was the #5 Porsche of Michael Christensen, while Kevin Estre in the sister #6 Porsche was a further two tenths off his teammate.

Then came the #2 Cadillac of Richard Westbrook. That’s interesting, since over one lap the #2 Cadillac was Toyota’s main challenger in the final standings, faster than the Ferraris and Porsches — yet over a stint they were at least half a second off that group, at least in the fourth session.

Then we have the #94 Peugeot, a second and half on average off Westbrook’s average and two and half seconds off Hirakawa’s pace-setting stint. Ouch. The French team will likely be scratching their heads trying to work out where the deficit lies. Let’s hope they can find something.

Glickenhaus and ByKolles — sorry, Vanwall — are significantly harder to analyse because both teams, with only a single car, did short stints, ranging between three and six laps, before pitting. The lap times for both, however, were slower than the Peugeot on average.

For Vanwall, it’s hard to say where the team’s pace truly lies. But for Glickenhaus, this is curious, since the team did significantly faster lap times, with the same balance of performance, at Sebring last year. 

The team did say on social media that “The main issue was set up with new WEC “No tire warmer” tires. We figured that out and improved by 1.5s” and “While totally rebuilding the car for the race, we’ll redo TC for new tires. That will improve our time, and we’ll be ready to race”. So, the Italian-American team is still a bit of an unknown here.

Finally, all the Hypercars were fairly reliable, not struggling with any technical issues. There were two driver errors, though, for Peugeot and Ferrari, both of whom can ill afford any less track time. Jean-Eric Vergne crashed the #93 Peugeot in the second session, on Saturday, coming together with the #10 Vector Sport Oreca 07-Gibson LMP2 car, while James Calado binned the #51 Ferrari at turn one, struggling with the cold tyre temperatures.

So, in summary. Toyota are definitely the team to beat at Sebring, as many expected. Cadillac, Ferrari, and Porsche all seem fairly close on pace, and not too far away from the Toyotas. Peugeot have got work to do if they want to be challenging that group. And Glickenhaus and ByKolles: hard to say with any certainty.

The first free practice session for the 1000 Miles of Sebring begins at 10:55am local time on Wednesday, lasting for an hour.