Toyota triumphs in a World Endurance Championship race. Nothing unusual in that, of course. Yet the Japanese manufacturer didn’t so much win the Imola 6 Hours as Ferrari lost it. The home marque was in the ascendent up the road from its factory last Sunday, only to throw it away. When rain arrived it got its strategy spectacularly wrong and its sparring partner nailed it spot-on as Mike Conway, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi took an against-the-odds victory.
Deep into the fourth hour, Ferrari was sitting pretty in 1-2 at the top of the leaderboard, James Calado in the #51 Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar ahead of Miguel Molina in the #50 sister factory car. Just after the clock hit four hours, the two factory cars and the satellite customer entry also run by AF Corse were in the pits having wet-weather tyres bolted on. The problem was that the rest of the Hypercar field had long since taken grooved rubber, the majority four laps earlier. Suddenly the trio of 499Ps were down in sixth, seventh and eighth, Calado in the best-placed of them a minute and a half down on race leader Kobayashi’s Toyota GR010 HYBRID LMH. The chance of victory for Ferrari in its back yard was gone.
It was a disastrous episode for Ferrari in front of a monster
