The fight for the win in the 2016 6 Hours of Fuji in 2016 didn’t disappoint, with it effectively coming down to Kamui Kobayashi in the #6 Toyota having to fend off a hard-charging Loic Duval in the #8 Audi after the R18 had led almost the entire race.
In the end Kobayashi took the win for the #6 TS050 by under two seconds, Toyota’s first since the round at Shanghai back in 2014, the year it won the World Championship.
Koabayashi’s teammate Stephane Sarrazin was extremely proud of the team’s achievement, which has put the #6 firmly in the title fight with two rounds to go.
“It’s amazing, after Le Mans it’s our most important race,” said a jubilant Sarrazin. “And we did it! My teammates did an amazing job, we had a very good car this weekend. The team has worked so hard this year to get a win.
“In the driver room in the final stint was incredible we were shouting and screaming, running up and down the pit wall telling the team to tell Kamui that he was doing a good job. We were trying to help him over the radio, he did such a good job at the end to hold off Duval.
“It felt like he did the race with one set of tyres!” added Sarrazin. “He did a double stint at the end with those tyres and was still flying, they didn’t even degrade much, he was incredible.”
The haul of 25 points from the race means that Sarrazin, Kobayashi and Mike Conway now sit just 23 points back from the #2 Porsche crew of Neel Jani, Marc Lieb and Romain Dumas in the Drivers World Championship standings.
“It will be difficult for us, but we have two races remaining and a very good car,” he said when asked about the trio’s renewed chances of taking the title. “I hope we continue like this but the level is very high. Once again the #2 was out of the game, it has been since Le Mans, I don’t know what’s happened since then. We will see.”
On the other side, Loic Duval was bitterly disappointed to have failed to catch the leading Toyota at the end. The Frenchman’s drive was nevertheless incredible, and saw him reduce the gap between himself and Kobayashi to under a second at one point after running 13 seconds behind following the winning Toyota’s final stop.
“It would have been better to win the race,” Duval said when asked to comment on his performance. “We had pressure all race long because it was so close, but in the last stint we stopped before the other guys because we have to refuel earlier, we didn’t know what to expect and we put on new tyres. They decided not to to get a massive gain in the stop.
“But in the end it was a really good fight between the three manufacturers who have been fighting really hard, pushing to the limit all the time.
“My stint at the end was good, I was trying my best. I was pushing but we knew that in cooler conditions it was tougher for us like in Austin. The window for our tyres is quite narrow, and in the end the Porsche and Toyota were better in those conditions.
“I gave it all I could but I didn’t know what they (Toyota and Porsche) were able to do, or whether they would be in front or behind me after the last stops,” he continued. “I just gave the maximum I had and tried to take the win.
“Being slower in the pit stops was our problem all weekend though, and we lost a lot of time which directly effected the result, and to be honest I’m not sure exactly what happened.”
