Written by Evan Veer, edited by Vyas Ponnuri
After the most competitive Hypercar season yet, the 2024 World Endurance Championship season returns to its now traditional season finale at the Bahrain International Circuit for its final eight hours of racing.
Saturday’s race gets underway in broad daylight, following which the race, and with it the 2024 season, fade into the darkness of the Bahraini desert to finish under the track’s floodlights.
The circuit itself has produced some good races in the past, with the first sector providing for constant side-by-side battles. The rest of the layout has a very balanced profile, featuring twisting medium to high-speed corners, with multiple hairpins and a very long straight.
The twisty layout combined with the high forecasted temperatures could make for a serious challenge in terms of tyre wear during the race, with teams generally trying to survive early stints on harder tyres so they can enter the night with fresh softer tyres for the colder closing stints.
This year’s event will mark the 12th WEC round held in Bahrain, with Toyota unbeaten around this configuration since 2017. Although the strength of its competition has grown enormously over the years, there are still good reasons to believe the Japanese marque will again be at the front of the field this time around considering their proven pace here.
Additionally, Toyota is helped by their extensive experience at the track, an advantage they were missing at the recently returning circuits of Saõ Paulo and COTA.
Heading into the final round of the year, all eyes are on the championship standings as Porsche, Toyota, and Ferrari all still have a shot at winning both the driver’s and manufacturer’s championships.
The No. 6 Porsche holds a comfortable lead of 35 and 37 points on the No. 50 Ferrari and No. 7 Toyota respectively. As an 8-hour round, Saturday’s race will reward 1.5 times as many points as in a regular round, coming down to a total of 39 points including the single point rewarded for pole position.
This means the No. 6 Penske Porsche only needs to bring home a handful of points for Lotterer, Estre, and Vanthoor to be guaranteed the driver’s title.
On the other hand, the manufacturer’s standings are a lot tighter, and with Porsche leading long-standing champions Toyota by only 10 points, either team will be guaranteed the championship if they win the race, regardless of where their rival finishes.
While the ‘big three’ manufacturer teams will be cautious to preserve their championship hopes there is no such constraint on the rest of the field, with BMW and Alpine especially looking willing to take risks to have a shot at getting a win in their first Hypercar season.
Similarly, JOTA have very little to lose in their last race as a Porsche customer team, before moving to the factory Cadillac program next season. Considering their outstanding pace around Bahrain last season, they are certainly one to keep an eye out on.
As both championship titles in the LMGT3 class have already been handed out, the front-running teams are all free to take extra risks in the fight for the last win of the season.
Even in the final round of 2024, it’s still hard to predict how the running order will stack up in terms of pace between all of the different LMGT3s, as nearly all of the teams have shown potential race-winning pace at some points in the season, whilst ending up well out of the points on other occasions.
The only exception to this rule has been the title-winning No. 92 Manthey Porsche, which has made it onto the podium in every race except Le Mans.
The Bahrain International Circuit will also host the WEC post-season rookie test, the entry list of which features a long list of drivers who, although new to the WEC itself, will be familiar to those keeping up with Formula One’s feeder series.
Another eye-catcher on the Hypercar entry list is BMW’s Valentino Rossi, though this test does not mean he will be on the list of prospective drivers for the full season next year.
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