The FIA World Endurance Championship resumes at Interlagos this weekend with the Hypercar title battle taking centre stage, as Toyota and BMW emerge from Le Mans as the leading protagonists in what promises to be a fascinating run to the end of the season.
Five races remain on the calendar, but uncertainty surrounding the championship’s closing rounds has added another layer of intrigue. With the conflict in the Middle East continuing to cast doubt over the events in Qatar and Bahrain, teams are still awaiting clarity on how the final part of the campaign will be structured. A briefing is expected later today, though a definitive decision is understood to have been delayed beyond the timetable previously laid out by LMEM.
Should changes be made to the calendar, or to the formats of the final races, the importance of Sunday’s six-hour contest in Brazil – and the subsequent rounds at Circuit of The Americas and Fuji Speedway – will only increase.
For Toyota Racing’s Mike Conway, who arrives at Interlagos leading the Drivers’ Championship alongside Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries after victory at Le Mans aboard the #7 TR010 HYBRID, the situation reinforces the need to maximise every opportunity.
“There are still five races, including this one,” Conway told DSC. “And the ones at the end of the season could be six-hour races, instead of eight or 10, like we were expecting. So in terms of points, it’s really going to count this weekend; you have to bank what you can.
“We know it’ll be tough with BMW, Cadillac and Ferrari all there. Alpine has had great speed as well.”
So much can change between now and the season finale, as BoP ebbs and flows, but the championship standings right now point towards a two-way fight between Toyota and BMW’s crews.
Toyota’s Le Mans victory gave the Japanese marque the advantage in both championships, but only just in the Drivers’ standings. Conway, Kobayashi and de Vries hold a slender four-point lead over Team WRT’s Robin Frijns and René Rast in the #20 BMW M Hybrid V8, whose runner-up finish at La Sarthe underlined the German manufacturer’s emergence as Toyota’s most consistent challenger.
Frijns and Rast, notably, will be the pursuing the title as a pairing, after their regular co-driver Sheldon van der Linde – who is set to contest all five remaining events – missed the Imola season opener due to a clash with his IMSA GTP programme.
The Manufacturers’ Championship tells a slightly different story. Double points at Le Mans allowed Toyota to extend its advantage to 36 points over BMW, with reigning champion Ferrari now 70 points adrift after an inconsistent opening half of the campaign.
Conway expects margins to remain exceptionally fine over the remainder of the season, particularly if the championship is required to visit alternative venues at short notice.
“It’s super tight, so you’ve got to score well,” he said. “Interlagos is normally a decent track for us, whereas Austin, we’ve not been super quick. Obviously, in Japan, we’re normally good, then we’ll see where the next ones will be, maybe Barcelona and Monza, I’ve heard? But it could be Bahrain and Qatar…”
Toyota also believes there is still performance to unlock from the updated aerodynamic package it introduced this season as its understanding of the revised car and 2026 Michelin compounds continues to develop.
“Now it seems like most people are on similar strategies in terms of tyres,” Conway explained. “If you look at Ferrari, when they first came in, they were always opting for the harder compounds; we’d do the opposite, but now they don’t need to do that anymore. And the tyres now last well.
“We’re still learning with the new aero and the new car. At Le Mans, we thought we’d be on a harder compound, and it didn’t work as well as we expected, so we ended up on Medium and Soft tyres.”
The revised package has also improved the car’s behaviour in wet conditions, something that could prove significant with rain forecast for Sunday’s race.
“We’ve had a little bit of running in the wet,” Conway said. “It’s definitely better (than the GR010). In the past, when it did rain, we weren’t super strong, so to have more consistency in the new aero package has made a big difference for us.”
If Toyota enters the second half of the season with the advantage, BMW arrives with momentum.
After opening the campaign as an outside contender, Team WRT converted encouraging pace into a breakthrough 1-2 finish at Spa before following it with a superb performance at Le Mans, where the #20 machine spent much of the race in contention for victory before ultimately finishing second.
For Frijns, missing out on Le Mans victory remains painful, but the result firmly established BMW as a genuine championship contender.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about the championship,” Frijns said. “The goal was always to win Le Mans, especially when you’re competitive all week, lead 100 or so laps. So it was a bitter pill to finish second as we really felt we had a shot.
“The next target is to go for the championship. We are in a good place, we work well as teammates, we have bonded a lot, and we know our strong and weak points internally.
“If everything goes well and we don’t have unlucky moments, I don’t see why we can’t be in the mix at the end.”
The Dutchman also believes Spa represented a turning point for Team WRT after two seasons of near misses.
“I’ve been with WRT since 2015, and all they care about is winning; they don’t care how they do it,” he said. “We’ve been frustrated the last two years because we’d come close to winning and didn’t, and we got annoyed.
“Now we have the monkey off our back because we got the 1-2 in Spa and showed we can win races. It’s been such a morale boost. And last year we performed well when I was watching from afar in Formula E.”
Rast, meanwhile, is keen to keep the championship picture in perspective.
“If we gain points to Toyota, or lose points, it is what it is,” he said. “As long as we maximise our package, I think we can be happy.”
He is also wary of the challenge awaiting BMW at Interlagos, where Cadillac dominated twelve months ago.
“Here, I think if we can put everything together, we can fight for another top-five result,” Rast added. “It depends on pace because last year the Cadillac was outstanding and lapped us.”
Interlagos is a venue that is tough on tyres and traditionally rewards track position. The shortest circuit on the calendar offers few overtaking opportunities, placing a premium on qualifying, although intriguingly no outright winner at the venue has started from pole position. Tomorrow’s Hyperpole session may give us a true indication of which direction the title battle will head in next.
Images courtesy of Peter May, DPPI, Toyota Racing and Andrew Lofthouse
