After 14 hours of testing at the Lusail International Circuit ahead of the 2025 FIA WEC season opener in Qatar next Friday, it was BMW Team WRT which ended up setting the best time across the two-day Prologue.
Robin Frijns found speed in the #20 M Hybrid V8 early in the final session under the floodlights and set a 1:38.971, becoming the only driver to go below 1:39, putting him quicker than the 2024 pole time from Porsche.
“I think it went alright,” Frijns said. “We had a test programme before arriving to Qatar, we followed it pretty much and everything feel fine. Now we need to put the puzzle together and prepare ourselves for the race weekend which is a bit different. As we don’t drive at night during FP1 and FP2, today was our only opportunity so that was quite important for us. Now it’s all about discussions and see how we can improve the package we have for the race.”
In the end, the gap was small to the rest of the field, with the #38 JOTA Cadillac getting within two-tenths after a 1:39.116 from Sebastien Bourdais. A Ferrari was next, the #83 499P from AF Corse slotting in third with a 1:39.1 of its own courtesy of Robert Kubica. The other BMW ran quickly too, and ended up fourth, edging the #12 JOTA Cadillac that snuck into the top five.
For Cadillac, it’s been a pretty encouraging start to the season. Both its V-Series.Rs were consistently fast as the track evolved and suffered no major dramas with their new service provider JOTA at the controls.
“We’ve got six generally happy drivers, which is always a good gauge of how it’s going, If the path you travel is down a corridor, our corridor is very wide at the moment because we’re making sweeping changes to try different things, which is what testing is for,” said Sam Hignett, JOTA Sport co-founder and director after the final session.
“What’s really encouraging is wherever we go, it’s a definitive answer. We’re narrowing the corridor to find the best window where the car operates. We should roll into race weekend in pretty good shape.
“We can go testing and do things, but it’s just not the same as being at the Prologue. There’s so many bits and pieces, working with the other cars, GT car traffic, working with the race director, pit lane rules and full-course yellows. It is absolutely the best test session we do all year.”
It was a highly productive final session for the majority of the field, with 12 of the 18 cars completing over 100 laps during the four hours.
The #5 Porsche ended with the highest total, 119 laps, though both Penske factory cars didn’t push for times, ending up 16th and 17th, both over 2.7 seconds off. There will be no alarm bells ringing though; the past 48 hours have been an opportunity to experiment, no prizes are given for hot laps.
Urs Kuratle, the director of factory racing at Porsche, confirmed post-session to reporters that the engine failure yesterday for the No. 6 was the first for the 963 programme. The team believes it understands the failure, and has sent it back to Weissach for analysis, which should be completed before track action resumes next week.
Despite the interruption, he said that the team is happy with its performance. It managed to complete “perhaps 75 per cent” of its planned programme, with some positive results. “We are happy with progress,” Kuratle continued. “While we are pushing for repeated success here, the field is now very tight. There is barely a single factory team with the potential exception of the brand new Aston Martin, that you can count out.”
The only notable incidents in the class were a spin for the #007 Aston Martin Valkyrie, which ended up in the gravel with Ross Gunn at the wheel and an off for the #38 Cadillac at Turn 13.
The recovered Valkyrie was almost immediately subjected to a black and orange flag, which DSC believes was as a result of a tow-hitch which required modification. All in all, there’s a very positive feeling in the Aston Martin THOR camp, with plenty of laps completed, data gathered, lessons learned and tweaks made.
The sensible corporate line is being deployed that getting both cars to the finish of the opening 10-hour race would mark huge early success for the programme.
As for the LMGT3 runners, the #21 Vista AF Corse Ferrari topped the times but also ended up stranded on track at Turn 9 towards the end of the night.
The best time for the lead 296 was a 1:54.790 from Simon Mann. It was a pretty fast lap, half a second quicker than the best time set ahead of Session 4 by Jonny Edgar in the #33 TF Sport Corvette, and within half a second of last year’s pole time.
The #54 Ferrari made it a 1-2 for the Italian brand, with a 1:54.810. Heart of Racing came closest with its Aston Martin Vantage, which was the third of five cars that dipped into the 1:54s. The others were the #33 TF Sport Corvette and #78 AKKODIS ASP Lexus.
Saturday’s sessions saw a total of 6854 laps completed across both classes for a total of 12,205 over the two days of testing.
The track action will begin again next Wednesday with the first of three practice sessions, followed by qualifying on Thursday and the 1812KM race proper on Friday.
