No. 6 Porsche Crew Had “Luxury to Afford” Challenging Finale

Andre Lotterer admits that he and Porsche co-drivers Kevin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor had the “luxury to afford” a challenging FIA World Endurance Championship season finale they faced in Bahrain en route to the Hypercar drivers’ title.

The No. 6 Porsche scored its worst finish of the season in 11th place, but with the championship-leading crew’s nearest rivals also failing to score, it meant that Lotterer, Estre and Vanthoor secured the title by a comfortable 35-point margin.

Estre qualified the car in sixth but Vanthoor suffered a disastrous opening lap, slipping to 14th after contact with the No. 50 Ferrari 499P of Miguel Molina, before Estre was able to push back up the order in the middle part of the race.

Two late safety car periods then undid the progress made by Estre and Lotterer, with Vanthoor receiving two penalties for late incidents that left the No. 6 crew with no points.

But with the No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid retiring and No. 50 Ferrari crew finishing 12th, it didn’t affect the final outcome of the drivers’ title.

“We knew we wanted to start around the top five, but in the end we were pushed twice by some red cars and in the end we lost a lot of positions,” said Estre.

“Then we were at the back and the pack is quite close together, so we couldn’t make up positions.

“You just eat up your tires and Laurens had a tough time in the traffic. We were quite far, 14th for most of the first two hours, then I got in and we made a good strategy call and I had clean air to start with.

“I was able to pass cars coming out of the pits on cold tires and I was taking a bit of a risk at this stage.

“We had a good car at that time and we could come back, but then we had the safety cars. At the end we had some contact and penalties, which screwed us out of the points.

“We had some tough moments, thinking we were going to lose this championship, because we had a lot to lose this weekend, and the others could take a lot of risks to win it and we had to manage our risk to not lose it, let’s say. It was very difficult.

“It was definitely our worst race of the season, but after being on the podium so many times, winning twice, I think we can be proud of our season.”

Lotterer, who earned his second WEC drivers’ title in his final outing for Porsche Penske Motorsport added: “I’m lucky to be with this team and share the car with these two amazing guys who are at the top of their game.

“We have a great group of people working on everything. Our new engineers we had on the team also played a role in improving the car and that reflected in the whole season.

“Today was not the best day, but we had the luxury to afford it, even though at some points it didn’t look like that if the No. 7 [Toyota] had a good result. If our race had continued to go badly, we would have been a bit more nervous.

“But things settled a bit and we are world champions, so we can go home happy, target achieved.”

After taking over from Lotterer for the final part of the race, Vanthoor picked up a pair of five-second penalties for two separate incidents, one with the Alpine of Charles Milesi and one with the BMW driven by his younger brother Dries.

“I haven’t made many mistakes I think this year but I kind of made up for it today!” said the Belgian driver. “It wasn’t one of my proudest performances today, but I hope everyone forgets it in two days!

“This year has been amazing. It’s never worked with a group like this before with Kevin, Andre, the engineers and mechanics. There hasn’t been one moment where we had an argument or somebody being pissed off or anything like that.

“We always looked at the big picture, we always worked together, we always found the best solutions, all of us made our own contributions and together we were successful.

“It hasn’t sunk in yet completely but it’s a season I will never forget.”

Davey Euwema contributed to this report