Monza Post-Race Notebook

***Alpine’s Nicolas Lapierre, Andre Negrao and Matthieu Vaxiviere increased their Hypercar FIA World Endurance Drivers Championship lead to 10 points by winning the 6 Hours of Monza. They arrived at the event just three points ahead of the No. 8 Toyota lineup of Sebastien Buemi, Ryo Hirakawa and Brendon Hartley.

***Glickenhaus Racing’s turbo-related retirement dropped its drivers Olivier Pla and Romain Dumas to fourth behind the No. 7 Toyota crew in the championship standings.

***Will Stevens, Antonio Felix da Costa and Roberto Gonzalez increased their LMP2 lead from 11 points to 19 points by finishing second. However, all of the crews down to and including the tenth-placed No. 22 United Autosports lineup remain in mathematical contention with two rounds to go.

***Algarve Pro Racing’s James Allen, Rene Binder and Steven Thomas have moved into the LMP2 Pro-Am points lead ahead of AF Corse’s Nicklas Nielsen, Alessio Rovera and Francois Perrodo.

***Ferrari’s defending champions Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado took the GTE world championship points lead for the first time this season. It is tight at the top of the leaderboard, with Gianmaria Bruni only one behind and fellow Porsche drivers Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen sitting two points off.

***A USB stick was at the root of the drive-through penalty that dropped the No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE Evo out of the GTE-Pro lead and arguably cost it the win. The storage device holding the car’s data was not transferred to race control after a pit stop.

***Despite losing a chance to win on home soil, Pier Guidi felt happier Monza than he was at the TotalEnergies 6 Hours of Spa, which he won, due to the Ferraris being more competitive after a ‘black ball’ BoP change. “At Spa we won, but we knew we had no pace and no performance,” he told Sportscar365. “Looking to the future, we are competitive and we can fight for the championship now.”

***The No. 51 Ferrari was also given a drive-through penalty that is suspended until the end of the season — provided there is no repeat offense — for Pier Guidi “not respecting race director instructions at the start to reduce the gap [to] 232 meters”.

***JOTA was fined €3,000 ($3,036 USD) due to the leader light system on its No. 28 Oreca “not working for several laps” according to a post-race stewards’ report.

***While Team WRT’s No. 41 car won LMP2, the sister No. 31 suffered a further setback in its title defense when it encountered both a puncture and a cooling leak. “The pace was good, we were one of the quickest cars but then we had that leak and spent a few laps in the box, and that was it,” Robin Frijns said.

***Vector Sport team principal Gary Holland said he hopes his team’s first-ever LMP2 podium ‘repays some of the faith the ACO has shown in us as a new team’. He added: “I am very pleased that we could take the fight to the teams who have been doing this for 10 years or so.”

***The British team’s third place was a significant improvement over its previous best finish in the championship when it finished tenth at Spa in May.

***TF Sport driver Henrique Chaves’ airborne accident at the second chicane sparked widespread reaction on social media, from people involved in the WEC and further motorsport, regarding the use of ‘sausage’ curbs at track limits. Almost all voiced concern about how the long, rounded curbs launched the Aston Martin Vantage GTE into the air, with some calling for their total removal.

***The WEC freight leaves for Fuji on Tuesday, so TF Sport is putting one of its European Le Mans Series Aston Martins in the containers, after racing it at Monza the weekend before last. The team will then assess the crashed No. 33 car to determine the full extent of the damage and see whether it can be flown out to Japan.

***Despite their car’s retirement, Marco Sorensen and Ben Keating still lead the GTE-Am drivers’ championship, albeit by a reduced margin of four points over NorthWest AMR’s David Pittard, Nicki Thiim and Paul Dalla Lana.

***With their GTE-Pro class victory at Monza, Corvette Racing became the first U.S.-based team to win a regular-season WEC race since DragonSpeed captured LMP2 class honors at Spa in 2019.

***Nick Tandy became only the third driver in WEC history to prevail in three different classes after Bruno Senna and Harry Tincknell. Tandy previously won in LMP2 at the Nürburgring with KCMG in 2015, a month after his overall 24 Hours of Le Mans victory.

***Robert Schwartzman, currently a test driver with Ferrari’s Formula 1 team, was present at Monza. The Russian driver, who won the 2019 FIA Formula 3 title with Prema, was there along with Estonia’s Ralf Aron who also competed for Prema in F3. Bart Mampaey, owner of the successful RBM touring car squad, was also on-site.

***Like Peugeot, Toyota will take its LMH cars back to base to work on them after Monza, before flying them to the 6 Hours of Fuji. “The cars are flying,” said Toyota’s WEC technical director Pascal Vasselon. “The rest of the equipment is on the boat.”

***Vasselon described the race as “quite tough” in terms of managing the new open differential hardware that Toyota is now using and will be required to use from next year. In terms of tire life, the Toyota GR010 Hybrids maxed out on double stints.

***Jim Glickenhaus said that his team had received no prior warning signs before the race-ending turbocharger failure on its No. 708 Glickenhaus 007 Pipo. “There was nothing wrong,” Glickenhaus told Sportscar365. “There was no oil leak, no intercooler problem, there were no pressure problems, it was just a catastrophic failure of the turbo.”

***Glickenhaus said Pipo Derani’s drive-through penalty was the result of not ‘not pushing the Full Course Yellow button quickly’, but reckoned the No. 708 car was quick enough to have been able to recover had the turbo failure not occurred. “I think we likely would have won, I do,” Glickenhaus said.

***Toyota’s Sebastien Buemi described the Glickenhaus as being “on a different planet” before its sudden turbo failure. Romain Dumas set the fastest lap of the race in the American-entered car: a time of 1:36.589 on lap four that was over a second quicker than the other Hypercar entries.

***Porsche placed Richard Lietz’s helmet on top of its No. 91 car during the pre-grid, with a “get well soon!” message attached to the visor after the Austrian tested positive for COVID-19.

***Sunday’s race failed to beat last year’s distance record on the WEC’s second race visit to Monza. Negrao, Vaxiviere and Lapierre completed 194 laps en route to their second win of the season – ten less than Toyota’s No. 7 crew completed almost 12 months ago.

***Lapierre has “a few plans” for next year and expects to continue racing in the European Le Mans Series with the Cool Racing team that he owns. The 2024 Alpine LMDh program is also set to play a factor: “I would love to be part of the LMDh program, which is the idea,” Lapierre told Sportscar365.

Davey Euwema contributed to this report