Written by Evan Veer, Edited by Vyas Ponnuri
The World Endurance Championship is heading to Brazil’s Autódromo de Interlagos in São Paulo for its return to the South American continent.
It’s been a while since the championship’s last visit to the track in 2014, and despite Interlagos having hosted WEC races before the vast majority of teams and drivers are heading into the weekend as blind as they would be at new tracks like Qatar earlier this year.
Since everyone is heading into the weekend more or less blind, the playing field should be significantly more equal for those new to the championship.
If weather forecasts are to be believed, the weekend will be relatively cold, but with a major jump in outside temperature between Saturday and Sunday, teams may find that track conditions in the race will be very different from those they prepared for in practice.
Notably, Ferrari will be debuting their first set of upgrades to the 499P this weekend, with a number of small aerodynamic changes aimed at improving brake cooling, something which may not directly lead to an increase in raw speed, but expected to make the car more manageable to drive during the race.
Coming fresh off their second Le Mans win in two years the Ferrari squad should be the obvious favorites again this weekend, but if Le Mans showed us anything it’s that at the front of the Hypercar field the likes of Ferrari, Toyota, and Porsche are just too close to meaningfully predict who will have the advantage come race day.
While the earlier rounds are often seen as an extended build up to Le Mans, the leading manufacturers will now be shifting their attention to the second big prize up for grabs: The Hypercar manufacturer’s championship.
With Porsche leading Ferrary and Toyota by a mere nine and 12 points respectively, we can be sure that their already close fight will flare up even more, while all the other manufacturers behind have very little to lose and may thus be inclined to take a more risky approach in the remaining rounds.
Meanwhile those further behind in the pack are starting to knock on the door of the front field ever more, with both Alpine and BMW showing that they do in fact have the pace to even challenge for podium positions, though completing a race without trouble has proven a challenging task for both.
Alpine’s painful reliability woes less than six hours into Le Mans will have undoubtedly created some nervousness within the team, even when it comes to making it to the end of the shorter rounds of the calendar.
After an impressive win at Le Mans the LMGT3 championship has clearly become Manthey Porsche’s to lose, being the only manufacturer who has consistently been able to always have at least one car fighting at the front of the field, which means the two Porsches are now in a shared first place in the standings.
Right now it looks like their main concern will be BMW, as the #31 is right on their tail and both cars have shown serious speed despite being knocked down by misfortune on several occasions.
As the season progresses, the field does appear to be tightening up somewhat, as the teams who were towards the lower end of the timesheets during the first rounds appear to have made a massive step up during the last two rounds, most notably McLaren, Ford, and Lexus who have all suddenly found themselves fighting at the front of the field at Le Mans.
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