Fuji Post-Race Notebook

***Toyota maintained its authority on modern-era FIA World Endurance Championship races at Fuji with its ninth victory in ten editions of the six-hour race. The Japanese manufacturer’s streak at its home circuit makes up 20 percent of all its WEC victories.

***It marked the fourth win of the season for the No. 7 Toyota crew, which matches the 2019-20 season run of victories that took Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez to the world championship title.

***This year, however, the trio will enter November’s season-ending 8 Hours of Bahrain at a 15-point deficit to teammates Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Sebastien Buemi.

***Both Ferrari AF Corse crews have a mathematical, although slim chance of snatching the title, with the No. 51 drivers sitting 31 points behind and a 36-point gap for the No. 50 crew, with a maximum of 39 points possible in Bahrain.

***Kobayashi, who doubles as the team principal, wasn’t aware that Toyota clinched the manufacturers’ world championship until the podium ceremonies. “My engineer didn’t tell me during the in-lap, so I just realized [on the podium],” he said. “I was a bit surprised to be honest.”

***The results from Sunday’s race are subject to final inspection of parts that were impounded from the No. 2 Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac V-Series.R, No. 6 Penske Porsche 963, No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid and No. 50 AF Corse Ferrari 499P. No parts were taken from the No. 94 Peugeot 9X8, which was the only other Hypercar to go through post-race technical scrutineering.

***Team WRT notched its ninth LMP2 victory in WEC, moving the Belgian squad to second in all-time wins in the class, which is being removed from the full championship at the end of this season.

***Thomas Flohr and Francesco Castellacci returned to the top step of a WEC podium for the first time since Fuji 2017, while co-driver Davide Rigon won his first GTE-Am race since 2013 when he was part of 8Star Motorsports’ winning lineup in the 6 Hours of Shanghai.

***It ended a drought of 34 GTE-Am races without a victory and 15 without a podium for the long-time driving partnership of Castellacci and Flohr.

***The No. 54 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE Evo bounced back from an Hour 3 incident with the No. 33 Chevrolet Corvette C8.R of Ben Keating. “It was a big scare when I was hit by the Corvette,” said Flohr. “Lucky enough, my past rally experience allowed me to keep the car on the grass and go straight and not into the wall. We recovered. It’s synonymous of how the team is performing.”

***Keating reckoned it was a racing incident: “It was my intention to make his braking line tighter. As I went to get close to him, he came over to get into the braking line and the fact is that we came together. But because the normal line is to go out wide for the brake zone, they deemed I went into him more than he went into me. I felt like it was a racing incident.”

***Toyota’s WEC technical director Pascal Vasselon felt that Porsche’s mistake of not putting a full tank of fuel in before the start had a say in the race outcome. “It means they have done a short first stint, which has forced them in the next stints to save a lot,” he assessed. “They had to do 40 laps… this has helped us to catch back because they had to do this fuel saving to not have a splash. Thanks to that, we could come back.”

***Porsche Penske Motorsport, however, downplayed the impact of needing to fuel save during the race after bringing Laurens Vanthoor in from his first stint six laps early.

***PPM managing director Jonathan Diuguid said regarding the fueling error: “That’s a procedural thing that we need to figure up on our side. Ultimately, I don’t think it had a huge impact on the race result. But it could have, and that’s why we need to clean those things up.”

***While Porsche had its most competitive WEC race with the 963, it encountered power steering issues on the No. 5 Penske-run car which was classified last overall but made it to the finish. “We really used it as a rollout before Bahrain because the cars have to go in sea freight [on Monday] afternoon,” said Diuguid.

***Fuji was the first WEC race this season in which a Ferrari 499P did not reach the podium. As had been the case earlier in the campaign, the AF Corse factory squad took a conservative approach to tire management, opting to start on Michelin’s hard compound.

***Ferrari’s GT and sports cars race and testing manager Giuliano Salvi viewed Porsche’s improvement as surprising, unlike its own showing. “On a free race without safety cars, this was our expectation,” he said. “We have never been here and didn’t know the track much, so our approach with the tires was on the conservative side.”

***Cadillac started on medium tires all around, but the Chip Ganassi Racing-run team later discovered this to be a mistake. “Like most of the other competitors, we should have put new hards on the outside,” team manager and strategist Stephen Mitas told Sportscar365. “From there, we missed some time. When you do that, it sometimes cascades.”

***A notable episode for the Cadillac V-Series.R was the left-front wheel becoming dislodged during Earl Bamber’s turn at the wheel. The manufacturer later attributed this to the left-front wheel ring shearing off.

***CGR plans to test the Cadillac at Imola later this month. “The car was far from perfect this weekend,” Mitas added. “We managed to get a lot of out of it in quali, but the race pace is not where it should have been.”

***Peugeot was unable to recapture its Monza competitiveness due to struggles with traction out of slow corners in the twisty third sector. The manufacturer’s technical director Olivier Jansonnie said the result was “as we have expected” but noted that both Peugeot 9X8s had largely clean races.

***The main setbacks were felt by the No. 93 Peugeot, which was spun by the No. 60 Iron Lynx Porsche 911 RSR-19. It then came into the pits for checks in which the engine cover was removed. “We needed to check something on the clutch of the No. 93,” said Jansonnie.

***Stoffel Vandoorne enjoyed his first race outing with Peugeot in the No. 94 car. “I felt comfortable straight away in the car and had a very good two stints,” the Belgian driver told Sportscar365.

***Albert Costa, Fabio Scherer and Jakub Smiechowski face an uphill task to win the LMP2 drivers’ title after finishing ninth in Inter Europol Competition’s Oreca 07 Gibson. Team WRT’s win saw Robert Kubica, Louis Deletraz and Rui Andrade increase their points lead by 23 points.

***Inter Europol team principal Sascha Fassbender told Sportscar365 that the No. 34 Oreca was quick at times but lost significantly just after Scherer jumped in on new Goodyear tires. “When Albert was out, he was on average one of the strongest. We need to analyze deeper, but Fabio’s stint when he was out on new tires, he was for any reason very slow.”

***It was a race of contrasting fortunes for Alpine, which saw its No. 36 Oreca finish fifth in LMP2 while the No. 35 ended up three laps down in 11th. Signatech team principal Philippe Sinault attributed the No. 35 car’s lack of pace to the circuit inexperience of Olli Caldwell and Memo Rojas.

***Sinault said: “Memo and Olli only had five laps each in the dry to get to grips with the track [during practice]. At the start, Memo got blocked in and quickly found himself in trouble with his tires. We decided to shorten his stint, but despite the best efforts of Andre and Olli, the gap was already there.”

***Hertz Team JOTA driver Will Stevens reckoned the British squad could have scored its best result so far with the Porsche 963, if not for a drive-through penalty after Antonio Felix da Costa turned around JOTA’s LMP2 teammate. “If that hadn’t happened, we could have grabbed fourth place,” Stevens said.

***The official weekend attendance figure of 54,700 established a new record for the WEC event at Fuji. Among the pre-race festivities was a display from aerobatics pilot Yoshihide Muroya from the Lexus Pathfinder Air Racing team.

***Iron Lynx was racing in two different east Asian countries last weekend. In addition to its Porsche GTE-Am effort in WEC, the Italian squad was also running two cars in Lamborghini Super Trofeo Asia at China’s Shanghai International Circuit.

***Corvette Racing’s Keating purchased Rolex watches for his co-drivers Nicky Catsburg and Nico Varrone to commemorate their 24 Hours of Le Mans class win. Only the overall winners receive timepieces from the race organizers.

***Sportscar365 understands that the tender for the next-generation LMP2 engine supplier closed in late August. Current supplier Gibson is known to have submitted a bid, along with multiple others.

John Dagys contributed to this report