Imola Wednesday Notebook

***Wednesday was the first of two ‘rest’ days between the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Prologue and first practice getting under way for the Imola season opener, giving teams the chance to analyze Tuesday’s data.

***One squad hard at work was Heart of Racing Team as the Aston Martin Valkyrie team built up its No. 009 machine after Marco Sorensen’s crash on Tuesday. Sorensen has given more details about his accident, which left the car requiring a change of chassis. The Dane crashed at Tamburello around mid-way through the morning session, leaving Aston with significantly less mileage than its Hypercar rivals.

***Sorensen said: “It’s far from ideal to have an incident like this in the Prologue. If it had to happen, I’m happy it happened in the Prologue so we have time to fix the car before the race. The tire warmup on these cars is extremely difficult, everyone knows it and it’s the same for everyone but, when you start sometimes trying to push the limits a little bit on the tire warmup, well it didn’t go well, it’s just what happened.”

***The other car among the Hypercar ranks to have suffered a significant reduction in Prologue mileage was the No. 15 Team WRT BMW M Hybrid V8, which only managed 25 laps during the morning before a precautionary engine change was required. Head of BMW M Motorsport Andreas Roos said the exact cause of the problem was not yet known and is being investigated.

***Roos told Sportscar365: “The engine is basically already in Munich. We organized the transport directly to Munich and it will be stripped and analyzed. Because we saw some values [concerning data], we changed the engine as a precaution. We don’t really have any big concerns because the engine until now ran always smooth and fine and we had endurance runs.”

***Despite Roos describing the issue as “not ideal,” he still said it was a positive day overall. “We clearly concentrated on our test program and what we wanted to do – we’re happy generally with what we did,” he added.

***Jules Gounon split his Tuesday between two tests, having started his day at the Red Bull Ring for the DTM pre-season test before boarding a private jet bound for Imola to get laps in the No. 36 Alpine A424 ahead of this weekend’s season opener. Gounon completed 58 laps in the afternoon session, clocking the fifth quickest overall time, and fastest among the Alpine drivers.

***Sunday’s season opener will mark Toyota’s 100th WEC race, which sees the Japanese manufacturer join Aston Martin, Ferrari and Porsche as brands in the centenary club, and the only OEM from the prototype ranks. Toyota’s WEC campaign began in the third race of the inaugural WEC season in 2012, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and has been ever-present since.

***Remarkably, Toyota has claimed 49 wins and 109 podiums out of its 99 WEC races to date, including five consecutive triumphs in the 24 Hours of Le Mans from 2018-22. Its prototypes have completed a combined 293,796 kms (182,556 miles), which is the equivalent of seven trips around the world, split between 15 tracks, excluding the Prologue venues at Paul Ricard and Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, which did not host races.

***Brendon Hartley has been part of Toyota’s lineup since 2019 and has been encouraged by the Prologue performance from its latest prototype, the TR010. The Japanese manufacturer clocked the most laps of all the Hypercar squads and Hartley says it experimented with a variety of different setups.

***He added: “We had a pretty smooth day, no real dramas – one small issue in the pits where we lost 10-15 minutes but other than that we had a really smooth day of running. I think across all conditions, all drivers were pretty happy with the feeling of the car, but I think it’s quite hard to draw any conclusions on pace. It looks like we’re in the mix. We’ll still be learning at the first races about how to really optimize [the revised car].”

***Anthony McIntosh, whose No. 69 Team WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO will run each race with a different BMW-inspired throwback livery, revealed that he and co-drivers Parker Thompson and Dan Harper will be testing at every WEC circuit prior to each event. The trio are fresh off an outing at Circuit Of The Americas, having utilized a BMW chassis that the FIA Bronze-rated driver owns himself.

***WRT is understood to become one of the very few teams to undertake a pre-event test at Interlagos, with only Manthey believed to have tested at the Brazilian circuit in the past, outside of the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo event itself. McIntosh confirmed to Sportscar365 that they will rent a locally-based M4 GT3 EVO chassis for the test.

***McIntosh and Thompson, meanwhile, are set to undertake a full season in the Italian GT3 Sprint Championship, which kicks off next weekend at Imola, at the wheel of a Ceccato Racing BMW. McIntosh and fellow American Glenn McGee won the GT3 Am class title in the series in 2024, while it will mark Thompson’s series debut.

***He told Sportscar365: “I just love the series so much. I was telling Parker about it. Parker actually did time [in Italy] karting. He came here when he was very young. His dad just dropped him off and left, so he lived with a family here!” Thompson added: “I’m brushing up on my Italian this weekend!”

***Yasser Shahin has abandoned plans to contest next month’s Nürburgring 24 following his accident in qualifying at last weekend’s NLS3 event. The Bronze-rated Australian told RSL’s John Hindhaugh that his accident was triggered by a technical problem with the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsport RS he was driving at the time.

***It was speculated that Shahin would potentially attempt to earn his ‘A Permit’ in one of this weekend’s N24 Qualifiers races, which would have required the Manthey Racing LMGT3 driver to jump back and forth between Imola and the Nordschleife, although this has been ruled out.

John Dagys contributed to this report