COTA Post-Race Notebook

***Porsche Penske Motorsport took its first victory of the FIA World Endurance Championship season following a controlling run by the No. 6 Porsche 963 of Kevin Estre in the closing hours of Sunday’s Lone Star Le Mans event at Circuit of The Americas. Estre shared driving duties with Laurens Vanthoor and Matt Campbell.

***Campbell, who claimed his first WEC victory since Spa-Francorchamps 2019, in GTE-Am, said: “We really didn’t expect a result like this going into race day. I’m over the moon. The track conditions were extremely tricky at times. Still, we stayed clean over the distance. The whole team did a mega job. It’s simply fantastic to celebrate our first WEC win of the year.”

***It marked Porsche Penske’s first WEC win in nearly 12 months, with Vanthoor, Estre and Andre Lotterer, who all went onto win the 2024 drivers’ world championship, taking top honors in last year’s 6 Hours of Fuji.

***Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach added: “The first five hours were extremely wet, with plenty of offs. Our guys stayed out of trouble and really rose above themselves. The Porsche 963 was spot-on in these conditions.”

***Estre, Vanthoor and Campbell lept to third in the Hypercar drivers’ standings as a result of their victory. At the top of the points table, the No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari 499P narrowly outscored the No. 83 car, with Alessandro Pier Guidi, Antonio Giovinazzi and James Calado now 15 points ahead with two races remaining.

***Porsche also moved into second place in the manufacturers’ standings, although the deficit to championship leaders Ferrari has grown. The Prancing Horse now sits 65 points clear, ten more than after July’s 6 Hours of Sao Paulo.

***A post-race stewards’ decision gave the winning No. 6 Porsche of Estre a “warning” for the “slight contact” with the rear of Alessandro Pier Guidi’s No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari 499P on a restart with 1 hour and 45 minutes to go.

***Ferrari’s head of race and test operations Giuliano Salvi described the decision by the stewards to only award Estre a reprimand as “a bit disappointing”, revealing that an instruction by the team to Pier Guidi to take an unconventional line in the last corner was the root cause of the Turn 1 contact that gave the No. 51 car its puncture.

***Salvi told reporters: “The race engineer told [Pier Guidi] to stay more on the inside of the last corner because we thought there was more grip there. The outside seemed to be slippery. So he took a very inside line. He tried to close the line and he was touched on the inside. But it was enough to not have good acceleration from the last corner.”

***He added: “At Turn 1, it was a racing accident, but it was a consequence of Estre being inside. I would call it a consequence of the [contact at the] restart, which was a bit weird.”

***Salvi said he didn’t feel the sister factory No. 50 Ferrari that finished second had the raw performance to fight with Estre in the closing stages. “They were just slightly slower than car No. 51, which was the most performing car on our side,” he said.

***Miguel Molina however felt that being held up by one of the LMGT3 Corvettes during a full-course yellow period denied the No. 50 crew a chance to be closer to the No. 6 Porsche.

***The Spanish driver said: “We lost a few seconds behind a Corvette in the FCY, he was really slow, and that prevented us from catching [Estre]. I think I managed to close in to within four seconds, and then after the FCY I was eight or nine seconds behind.”

***Salvi said he felt that Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA had the strongest package overall during the race, with the No. 12 car running as high as third early in the final hour before dropping back. “Cadillac was extremely strong, I think they were probably the quickest car and we were really worried about their pace in FP2 and FP3,” said Salvi. “We were a bit lucky that they didn’t manage well in qualifying and they started so far behind.”

***In the third-string No. 83 Ferrari, Phil Hanson was left to rue a slow changeover to Yifei Ye that dropped the car out of the lead fight as the British driver was prevented from entering his box smoothly by one of the team’s LMGT3 cars. “That’s where it went wrong,” said Hanson, who denied later contact had any impact on the car’s performance.

***On the No. 83 drivers’ championship chances after dropping 15 points behind the No. 51 Ferrari crew at COTA, Hanson added: “We need to execute better, because if we leave points on the table like we did here and at a couple of other races, it won’t be enough. We need to do a better job as a team, which I think we’re capable of.”

***A spokesperson for AF Corse revealed that Robert Kubica made an unnecessary pit stop during his stint at the wheel of the No. 83 car, wrongly thinking that he had a puncture. Kubica rejoined the track without stopping after the team clarified there was no issue.

***The No. 83 crew clinched the FIA World Cup for Hypercar Teams with two races to spare. They succeed Hertz Team JOTA, which won the title with its privateer Porsche 963 last year before it became a factory Cadillac squad for the current season.

***BMW M Motorsport director Andreas Roos noted that the brand’s sole remaining Hypercar in the race was “clearly too slow today” after Raffaele Marciello, Dries Vanthoor and Kevin Magnussen came home in 12th after a challenging race. “We didn’t extract the performance that we have to extract under these conditions,” Roos told Sportscar365. “This we have to analyze and get better, because clearly the performance we showed today is not good enough to go for a podium or have a good result.”

***The race for the No. 15 car included an early call for slicks towards the end that was quickly aborted, with Dries Vanthoor returning to the pits a lap later. “We tried with slicks but it was still far too wet and we didn’t manage to switch the slick tires on,” Roos explained. “Then we said, ‘Okay, it’s too risky’ and then we went back to wet tires.”

***With regards to the issue that forced the sister No. 20 BMW into early retirement, Roos indicated that early signs pointed towards an isolation issue with the hybrid system, but that additional analysis would be required to discover the root cause of the problem.

***Alpine team principal Philippe Sinault said “the prevailing feeling is disappointment” after the French brand failed to score points with its pair of A424 LMDh cars, finishing 11th and 15th. “We put in a great week’s work and were pleased to have regained a solid level of performance. Everything was looking pretty good, but then came the rain and threw a spanner in the works.”

***A misunderstanding about a safety car swap, due to the primary car running low on fuel just before the end of the opening hour, which saw the majority of the field follow the safety car down pit lane, ultimately led to a red flag in order to re-order the cars to their previous lap. The red flag stoppage lasted 40 minutes amid the heavy rains.

***WEC race director Eduardo Freitas explained: “This created a complex situation, because the message that the safety car would come into the pits was not announced via radio to the teams, and with the poor visibility, the cars at the back did not see it. Therefore, at the exit of the pits, we ended up with cars out of position. To allow us to address this we [put] out the red flag out so we could go back to have the positioning of the cars where they were before this happened, and then we could get back underway with the correct running order.”

***Even though the No. 92 Manthey Porsche 911 GT3 R dropped to sixth in the closing stages of the race, Ryan Hardwick, Riccardo Pera and Richard Lietz managed to extend their points lead in the LMGT3 drivers’ standings to 19 points as both the No. 21 Vista AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3 and No. 33 TF Sport Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R failed to score at COTA.

***The No. 85 Iron Dames Porsche, meanwhile, retired two laps before the end of the race as a blocked radiator caused engine temperatures to spike.

***Marino Sato’s LMGT3 victory with United Autosports on Sunday ended a years-long win drought for Japanese drivers in WEC’s GT ranks. Keita Sawa was the last to do so, winning the GTE-Am class during the 2017 6 Hours of Silverstone in a Clearwater Racing Ferrari 488 GTE he shared with Weng Sun Mok and Matt Griffin.

***BMW boss Roos pointed to the M4 GT3 EVO’s strength in switching on slick tires early in mixed conditions as key to Kelvin van der Linde’s late podium charge for Team WRT, ultimately being classified second after the penalty for the No. 54 Vista AF Corse Ferrari.

***Roos said: “At the end, the last 20 minutes made the [difference], where we suddenly saw we can have a go for the podium. In the end, ending up second, super happy for the GT3 guys and big congratulations to Kelvin, Ahmad [Al Harthy] and Valentino [Rossi].”

***Proton Competition driver Bernardo Sousa won the Goodyear Wingfoot award, marking the second time this season that a driver from the No. 77 Ford Mustang GT3 was given the award that is decided by a fan vote. Sousa’s Silver-rated co-driver Ben Tuck won the prize at Spa-Francorchamps.

***WEC reported a weekend attendance of 66,217 spectators, an improvement on last year’s three-day crowd figure of 65,089 at COTA.

***Four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Leon Marchand was a guest in the COTA paddock on Sunday, notably appearing in the Alpine garage as well as in the cooldown room before the podium. The French native resides in Austin, training at the University of Texas.

***The WEC season continues with the 6 Hours of Fuji on Sept. 28, which will be the 100th race in championship history.

John Dagys and Jamie Klein contributed to this report