COTA Post-Race Notebook

***Sunday’s Lone Star Le Mans was the second-closest finish in the history of the FIA World Endurance Championship, with just 1.780 seconds separating Robert Shwartzman’s No. 83 AF Corse Ferrari and Kamui Kobayashi’s No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid at the checkered flag after six hours of racing.

***Incidentally, the closest-ever finish was also at the Circuit of The Americas in 2017, when the two Porsche 919 Hybrids were split by a mere 0.276 seconds.

***Victory for the No. 83 crew marks the second time this season that a non-factory entered car has won a round of the WEC, following on from Hertz Team JOTA’s triumph in the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps. It marks Ferrari’s third win with the 499P, and a first outside of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

***Shwartzman, Robert Kubica and Yifei Ye all scored their first overall WEC wins, as well as the first for their respective countries: Israel, Poland and China. Kubica also becomes the third driver in history to take outright wins in both WEC and Formula 1, joining Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso.

***Remarkably, AF Corse’s victory also marks the first time that any manufacturer has won a Formula 1 race and a world championship sports car race on the same day, with Charles Leclerc having triumphed for Ferrari on home soil earlier on Sunday in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

***Aston Martin became the third different manufacturer to score a win in LMGT3 following Porsche and BMW thanks to Heart of Racing Team trio Ian James, Daniel Mancinelli and Alex Riberas. It marks the British marque’s 53rd WEC win in total, and its first in any class since the 2022 6 Hours of Fuji, when TF Sport triumphed in GTE-Am.

***It also means Heart of Racing has stood on the podium in each of its six most recent appearances across the WEC and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

***Looking back on the drive-through penalty for ignoring yellow flags that cost the No. 7 Toyota crew a likely win, Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director David Floury highlighted that Kamui Kobayashi may have been caught out by an electronic panel apparently showing a green light exiting Turn 11, where the infringement took place.

***Floury said: “If you look at the split times in this sector, after the exit of Turn 11, the No. 83 was one tenth faster than us. So I struggle to understand how they got away without a penalty. There was a yellow flag being waved, but there was also a green light flashing. I know the yellow should prevail, but it’s a bit confusing to be honest.”

***Porsche Penske Motorsport’s managing director took a dim view on Sebastien Buemi’s driving when the Toyota driver forced Kevin Estre’s No. 6 car off the track on the back straight. “It was extremely dangerous,” said Diuguid. “It was one of the faster parts of the circuit and at that point he was already past, so I don’t know what his end goal was. Ultimately it took him out of the race from a flat tire and multiple penalties that he received from the action, so hopefully he’ll learn from it in the future.”

***For his part, Buemi commented: “I would like to apologize to the team for the contact I had with the Porsche. It was my fault and I’m sorry for that because obviously that effectively ended our race. Up until then the team had done a fantastic job to help us recover from starting down in 12th, so it feels really difficult to let the team down.”

***Across both Toyotas, only Kamui Kobayashi undertook a double stint at COTA. Conway and de Vries took turns at the wheel of the No. 7 car for the opening four hours, while Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa rotated at every stint in the No. 8.

***Floury explained: “It was quite hot today so we thought it was better for the drivers to be able to cool down before they jumped back in the car. [Doing a double stint] was just Kamui’s preference, due to the fact it is a bit cooler at the end of the race, but he also copes with it better than anyone else.”

***Ferrari’s head of endurance race cars Ferdinando Cannizzo expressed his disappointment about the Italian marque’s No. 51 car retiring after what he described as a “stupid” incident between Antonio Giovinazzi and the No. 78 Akkodis ASP Lexus RC F GT3 of Arnold Robin. This damaged the 499P’s left-rear wheel rim, which in turn caused a failure in the driveline.

***It marks the first time a Ferrari Hypercar has retired from a WEC race due to a mechanical problem.

***Cannizzo also said he was surprised that Giovinazzi was deemed to blame for the incident when another LMGT3 runner, the No. 82 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R, escaped punishment for contact with Ferrari’s No. 50 entry later in the race. “I don’t know which metrics [the stewards] use, because for example when one GT car touched our car 50, we lost position and it was no further action,” he said. “This is also sometimes disappointing there are different metrics in similar situations.”

***Despite missing out on victory at COTA, Toyota has taken the lead of the manufacturers’ championship, with the No. 7 car scoring the marque maximum points as cars registered for the FIA World Cup for Hypercar Teams do not count for points.

***Toyota takes a slender lead of 11 points over Porsche into the final two races of the year, with Ferrari 19 points down in third place.

***Alpine leads the battle for ‘best of the rest’ honors on 37 points, six ahead of BMW and eight ahead of Cadillac, which has jumped Peugeot for sixth.

***The No. 2 Cadillac V-Series.R carried minor aerodynamic damage throughout the race as a result of contact on the opening lap, which knocked the left dive plane off. Earl Bamber said afterwards that the team decided against a nose change to avoid losing time in the tight battle for top five positions.

***Jean-Marc Finot, Senior Vice President of Stellantis Motorsport, lamented that a first-lap puncture for the No. 94 Peugeot 9X8 left the car “out of the race” early on before it eventually retired with a hybrid issue. “With the 93 it was quite ok,” Finot added. “But compared to what we expected it was less demanding conditions today. The track was more demanding than we thought during qualifying, so we had to manage the degradation. We had to adjust and we were not at the expected pace.”

***Despite failing to score points in the FIA World Cup for Hypercar teams for the first time this year, the No. 12 JOTA entry still holds a 30-point lead over the No. 83 AF Corse Ferrari heading into the final two rounds of the season.

***JOTA driver Callum Ilott stated after the race that the No. 12 Porsche 963 “kept dying” after the electrical issues struck with Norman Nato at the wheel.

***Ilott said: “We did power resets, we kept trying things to solve the issue, because there’s a tight turnaround to Fuji. I think we know what it is but it was too long to change during the race. We tried to be as sensible as we could not to interfere in the race. We could have gone out half an hour earlier than we did at the end, but it would have interfered with the Hypercar pitstops. So we tried to avoid that.”

***Second place in LMGT3 for Manthey PureRxcing trio Alex Malykhin, Joel Sturm and Klaus Bachler has allowed them to stretch their advantage to 28 points over their Manthey stablemates Yasser Shahin, Morris Schuring and Richard Lietz.

***The 100-second penalty that dropped the No. 55 AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3 out of third place late in the race was handed down as a result of the car exceeding its maximum permitted powertrain power by five percent.

***Team WRT BMW driver Augusto Farfus won the Goodyear Wingfoot Award for the fastest stint average in LMGT3. The Brazilian leads the Wingfoot standings for the year so far ahead of Manthey’s Schuring and Heart of Racing’s Riberas.

***Dennis Olsen revealed to Sportscar365 that a broken steering rack likely led to the late-race retirement for the No. 88 Proton Competition Ford Mustang GT3. “It’s harsh here, but [this was] a bit surprising. The car has been so durable so far. But it’s our first year, so we’ve got to keep on tuning and improving.”

***Of the 36-strong field at COTA, only 28 were classified finishers, the smallest figure so far this year. The last time so few cars were classified was the 2020 8 Hours of Bahrain, where all 24 starters made it to the checkered flag.

***The WEC officially reported a three-day crowd of 65,089 at COTA, a significant increase on the figure of 22,000 given for the series’ previous visit to the track in 2020.

***The next round of the FIA World Endurance Championship is the 6 Hours of Fuji on Sept. 13-15.

John Dagys & Davey Euwema contributed to this report