How Ferrari overcame its toughest WEC 2025 challenge yet with Spa win

Ferrari took another World Endurance Championship victory at Spa. Just. It came out on top on a day in which it raced wheel to wheel and then some with Alpine and BMW.

Either manufacturer could have pipped James Calado, Antonio Giovinazzi and Alessandro Pier Guidi to the top spot, but the car that perhaps should have beaten them was the second-placed factory 499P Le Mans Hypercar shared by Nicklas Nielsen, Miguel Molina and Antonio Fuoco. 

The #50 car started by Nielsen was the fastest over the first five hours. Then it slipped behind the sister #51 car in the final results and the race averages followed on from the divergent strategies adopted by the two Ferrari crews over the final stages.

That robbed the massive crowd in Belgium – which fell a few hundred heads short of 100,000 for the three days – of a head-to-head battle on track, yet still produced a nail-biting climax to the Spa 6 Hours on Saturday.  

Ferrari’s two cars made their final full pitstops with approximately 60 minutes remaining. That’s longer than a Hypercar can normally go on its per-stint energy allocation, but it was decided that the car in which Nielsen also finished would try to make it home without stopping again. 

Pier Guidi in the sister car pushed on hard in the knowledge that he needed an advantage of around 35 seconds to take a late splash, hang on to P1 and make it back to back wins for the #51 Ferrari in this year’s WEC. His margin of victory was just over four seconds, though the gap stood at 11s immediately after his splash with 12 minutes remaining.

Nielsen took over from Fuoco for the run to the flag because, said Ferrari sportscar race and testing manager Giuliano Salvi, “when you need to go long, Nicklas is world champion”. He pointed back to last year’s Le Mans 24 Hours when the Dane had to eke out his energy on the way to victory after having to bring forward his final pitstop to close an open door.

A couple of quick-fire Full Course Yellows to clear debris undoubtedly helped his cause at Spa, but eradicating the need for a splash was still a monumental effort. Nielsen went 27 laps when the normal stint length was 25. What made that all the more impressive was that Spa, at 4.35 miles, is the longest on the WEC calendar bar Le Mans. 

When asked how much fuel Nielsen had left at the finish, Salvi replied: “Zero.” That was not counting the small amount required for scrutineering purposes after the race, he pointed out.

The gap to the rest it enjoyed at Qatar in February and Imola in April had to all intents and purposes disappeared.  Salvi was insistent that Alpine and perhaps BMW had the speed to win.

Ferrari split its strategies, explained Salvi, because it was far from clear cut which was going to be faster. He did concede, however, that avoiding the splash turned out not to be the quickest way. “In the end it was too long: to get there you can see from the lap times that the car wasn’t performing,” he said. 

Nielsen very nearly lost second position to Mick Schumacher in the Alpine A424 LMDh at the end. He was just nine tenths ahead when the flag dropped. 

On another day, the #50 could have ended up behind the French car Schumacher shared with Frederic Makowiecki and Jules Gounon. And for a number of reasons. One was that the second-placed Ferrari could have been penalised after a rather unusual, bizarre even, happening in the pitlane. 

Splitting strategies was key for Ferrari victory

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

Molina was running just ahead of Giovinazzi soon after the halfway mark when the second full safety car of the race was called. The two cars pitted out of second and third positions at the same time, which gave the AF Corse Ferrari team a problem. 

The #51 car’s pit stall was ahead of #50’s, so had they arrived at their respective boxes in race order there would have been all kinds of a kerfuffle. “It would have been a disaster,” is how Salvi put it. So Ferrari swapped the positions of its two cars while they were in the pits – doing it on track properly was not possible because the race had been neutralised. Molina moved to his right into the so-called blending lane to allow Giovinazzi past before ducking back in behind. 

A couple of laps after the race went green, Ferrari swapped the positions back on track, allowing Fuoco ahead of Pier Guidi. It was fearful that it might receive a penalty, most likely a plus five seconds to be taken at a regular pitstop later in the race, so it needed Fuoco to push on. 

What effect this had on the strategy choice of the #50 car later on isn’t entirely clear. But he was undoubtedly using more energy than his team-mate to try to build a cushion. In the end, Molina and Ferrari only received a reprimand for what happened in the pits, even though the stewards ruled that the manoeuvre was a “misuse of the pitlane”. 

Ferrari certainly got lucky in the stewards room at Spa on Saturday. There was probably some wider fortune for the dominant marque of the WEC so far this year on the race track. It might have dominated qualifying – Fuoco’s pole was six tenths up on the fastest non-Ferrari – but in the race it had nothing like that advantage, if any kind of margin at all. The gap to the rest it enjoyed at Qatar in February and Imola in April had to all intents and purposes disappeared. 

Salvi was insistent that Alpine and perhaps BMW had the speed to win. The French manufacturer’s second straight podium and third overall with the A424 came despite a slow puncture for Schumacher late in the penultimate hour. He was fourth at the time and right on Pier Guidi’s tail. It probably made very little difference. Schumacher lost little or nothing, the Signatech team simply readjusting its fuel strategy over the final portion of the race.

Ferrari wasn’t as superior at Spa, but it still found a way to get the job done

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

The #36 Alpine was right with the Ferraris on race pace in Belgium, though Makowiecki wasn’t convinced that he and his team-mates could have triumphed. Second place would have been possible on another day, he thought. 

Salvi argued that had Alpine had two cars in the thick of the battle, life might have been more difficult for Ferrari. The #35 entry shared by Ferdinand Habsburg, Charles Milesi and Paul-Loup Chatin wasn’t really in the mix on the way to an eventual eighth: it never got back on terms with the sister entry after a second-hour drive-through for speeding under the Virtual Safety Car. 

“At some moments of the race we were able to exploit the fact that we had two cars, in a proper and fair way,” reckoned Salvi. “I think with two Alpines there it would have been a completely different story.” 

Ferrari was expecting Cadillac to be a threat with its V-Series.R LMDh based on its pace over a long run in second free practice on Thursday, but a challenge from the two Jota entries never materialised

Makowiecki hustled the Alpine up from sixth on the grid, taking second from Calado with an incisive move into Eau Rouge at the start of lap 14. It wouldn’t be the last time of the race a Ferrari went wheel to wheel with one of its rivals. Paul di Resta aboard the #93 Peugeot would also make it past #51 for third before getting out of the car and then BMW driver Robin Frijns raced hard with both Giovinazzi and Pier Guidi. He seemed non plussed that the latter gave him the squeeze as they battled for position into Eau Rouge. He was, he said, “just enjoying the elbows out racing”.

The BMW M Hybrid V8 LMDh Frijns shared with Rene Rast only in the absence of Sheldon van der Linde never led the race, but it was there or thereabouts until the final hour. Frijns also dismissed Ferrari’s notion that it could have won the race, but, he reckoned, “a podium was within reach”. It wasn’t to be: a brake problem in the final hour put the car out. 

Peugeot’s 9X8 2024 LMH had its moments. Jean-Eric Vergne led the race in the third hour, though kind of by mistake. The team admitted that there was some kind of error, though didn’t elaborate, that resulted in the #93 car started by di Resta staying out on track when everyone else pitted under the yellows. The French manufacturer then appeared to compound its error by leaving him out on track at the next safety car.

Ferrari was expecting a fight from Cadillac, but the American marque failed to deliver on such promise

Photo by: Paul Foster

Ferrari was expecting Cadillac to be a threat with its V-Series.R LMDh based on its pace over a long run in second free practice on Thursday, but a challenge from the two Jota entries never materialised. It didn’t help that both cars received penalties early doors, though the team reckoned fifth and sixth was something to build on heading to Le Mans next month. 

Toyota wasn’t thinking that way after the fourth-place finish notched up the #8 GR010 HYBRID shared by Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Sebastien Buemi from the penultimate row of the Hypercar grid. The result owed everything to a repeat of the strategy call that sealed the manufacturer’s crown for the Japanese manufacturer in Bahrain last November – pitting the car out of sequence to get it into free air — rather than any genuine pace in the car. 

What Spa revealed as the most important race of the season approaches is that the rest of the field is edging closer to Ferrari, notwithstanding its advantage in qualifying. It could also be viewed as an irrelevance given that Le Mans has a Balance of Performance distinct from the other WEC events courtesy of the unique characteristics of the 8.47-mile Circuit de la Sarthe.

But Ferrari far from dominated at Spa as it had done at Qatar and to a lesser extent at Imola. However you look at it, that has to bode well for the ‘Big One’.  

Next up is the Le Mans 24 Hours which Ferrari has won the last two years

Photo by: Emanuele Clivati | AG Photo