Toyota, Alpine Return to Season-Starting Weights for Bahrain

Toyota and Alpine have received weight breaks and reductions in their allowed energy usage per stint for the next round in Bahrain, according to the latest Balance of Performance table for the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class.

The cars from the two full-season Hypercar entrants will return to the minimum weights at which they started the 2021 WEC season, with the Toyota GR010 Hybrids dropping 26 kg to 1040 kg and the Alpine A480 Gibson coming down by 22 kg to 930 kg.

Toyota and Alpine received weight increases by the same amounts for round two at Portimao, when the Glickenhaus 007 LMH was added into the mix.

Glickenhaus is absent from the BoP table due to the American team declining to participate in the back-to-back Bahrain rounds that mark the end of the WEC campaign.

Toyota and Alpine remained at 1066 kg and 952 kg respectively for the 6 Hours of Monza and the 24 Hours of Le Mans which the former won with its No. 7 machine driven by Mike Conway, Jose Maria Lopez and Kamui Kobayashi.

The BoP table for Bahrain gives Toyotas a maximum stint energy of 909 megajoules, down 53 megajoules since Le Mans in August.

Alpine’s per stint energy allowance has been cut by a lesser margin of 28 MJ, leaving the French team’s ORECA-built grandfathered LMP1 car at 816 MJ in total.

The Bahrain figures compare to the 964 MJ and 920 MJ limits that Toyota and Alpine received for the Spa-season opener in May.

The maximum power outputs for the penultimate round of the season will be 520 kW for the Toyotas and 454 kW for the non-hybrid Alpine.

There have been no weight changes in the GTE-Pro class, although the Ferrari 488 GTE Evo has received a boost reduction and a four-liter fuel capacity reduction, which leaves it at 89 l.

The change will also be felt by the teams running Ferraris in the GTE-Am class, while those running the Aston Martin Vantage GTE will be subject to a two-liter decrease.

AF Corse’s championship-leading and Le Mans-winning No. 83 Ferrari is the heaviest GTE-Am competitor according to the category’s success ballast table.

Nicklas Nielsen, Alessio Rovera and Francois Perrodo will compete with a 1300 kg car that carries 10 kg less than the second-most handicapped Ferrari from Cetilar Racing.

The Aston Martins from D’station Racing and Northwest AMR are the lightest cars in GTE-Am at 1247 kg.