Vosse: BMW ‘Has to Take Positives’ from COTA Showing

Team WRT boss Vincent Vosse believes BMW has to ‘take the positives’ from its performance at Lone Star Le Mans, where it delivered its most promising FIA World Endurance Championship outing to date but failed to deliver a result due to late-race penalties.

After the pair of BMW M Hybrid V8s both pushed through into Hyperpole for the first time in qualifying, the opening exchanges of the race saw Marco Wittmann and Rene Rast climb up into fourth and fifth, respectively.

The two BMWs were then one of the few cars to remain close with the trio of Ferrari 499Ps early on, with Rast even overtaking Miguel Molina for third and then moving up to second when the No. 51 car retired.

While a spin and subsequent early pitstop dropped Wittmann back into the pack, the No. 20 car remained a contender for a top-five finish until a pair of late-race penalties were incurred.

The second of these was most severe, with Sheldon van der Linde ordered to serve a 100-second stop-and-go for a technical infringement.

“It’s a mistake,” Team WRT principal Vincent Vosse told Sportscar365 after the race.

“We will analyze how it happened. We did not box on the lap we had to box. We did an extra lap on energy.

“In the end there was some positive things over the weekend. For a good half of the race we were fighting at the front, which is something new for us.

“We have to take the positive out of it. We don’t score a podium as long as we make mistakes.”

BMW M Motorsport director Andreas Roos was able to look on the bright side of BMW’s strongest Hypercar performance to date, but was also quick to point out that the brand still has more work to do.

“It’s definitely very positive that we were able to keep up the pace of the leading cars and fight with the Ferraris. This was for sure something very positive.

“As Vincent said, as long as we [make] mistakes, we will not be on the podium.

“What we have to take on the positive is that the speed was definitely very good, not only having two cars in the Hyperpole but also in the race we showed for a long period very, very good pace and were able to do good long runs to manage our tires to keep up with the top runners and this was positive. But we have to do our homework.”

“From the engineering and car performance side, it was definitely a boost. It was giving us a bit more… not hope but it was nice to see that the hard work at one stage pays off. It was nice to see, definitely.

“Generally when you look at the pace of the car over the whole weekend, the pace was definitely there. Then we have to build up on and eliminate the mistakes and hopefully we have a good chance to fight for the podiums in the future.”

Rast, who led BMW’s charge in the opening stints, described the result of Sunday’s race as “not what we were hoping for,” but also spoke positively about the ability to fight with Ferrari early on.

“We obviously saw during practice sessions that our car didn’t seem to struggle that much with tire deg,” Rast told Sportscar365. ‘So we were like, ‘OK, maybe we can fight for a good result here.’

“That we actually could put pressure on the Ferraris and overtake even, it was, for me at least, surprising. But obviously very good.

“BMW, WRT, everybody put a lot of effort into that project. And it feels good just to see results coming up slowly. We make small steps. But now we need to execute better.

“We just need to understand why on some tracks it clicks. Like, I think Imola was another good track for us and some other tracks, like Sao Paulo, [it] doesn’t click.

“Obviously, for the next two, Fuji and Bahrain, we don’t know how our car will behave.

“We hope for the best. We try understand why sometimes we are competitive and why not.”