Why Ferrari’s conservatism didn’t deny it in an Imola WEC thriller

Just eight and a bit seconds. That was Ferrari’s margin of victory at the end of the Sunday’s Imola round of the World Endurance Championship. Or to put it another way, around about half the advantage of 16s the 499P Le Mans Hypercar shared by James Calado, Antonio Giovinazzi and Alessandro Pier Guidi enjoyed over the best non-Ferrari at the end of the opening hour.

Ferrari kind of dominated the Imola 6 Hours, just as it had done over 10 hours in the opening round of the championship in Qatar in February. The 499P was the fastest thing around the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari during the race as it had been on the way to blocking out the front row in qualifying. The #51 car led 171 of the 212 laps and sat atop the leaderboard at the end of five of the six hours.

The two safety cars that punctuated this race had a lot to do with why it wasn’t nearly as comfortable for Ferrari on home ground as it might have been. The first full neutralisation at Imola wiped out a not insignificant advantage for #51 as the end of hour two approached: Calado was 3s up on Phil Hanson in the #83 customer Ferrari and a further 12s up on third-placed Kevin Magnussen in the #15 BMW. More significantly, this safety car and the one that followed, changed the dynamic of the race.

That’s what made the Imola 6 Hours such a thriller. The divergent strategies adopted by the manufacturers at or near the sharp end of the Hypercar pack didn’t quite blow the race wide open, but they left the world guessing at the final order as the clock ticked down.

Ferrari would probably have won by more with the #51 car had it not opted for a conservative strategy over the final two hours. The Italian manufacturer and the AF Corse factory team wanted to cover all the bases at a track where it had hit the self-destruct button 12 months. A victory in its backyard was tossed away when it left both the works entries and the AF-run customer car out on slicks when the rain came late in hour four. This time Ferrari played it safe, and understandably so.

When Pier Guidi climbed into the car for the final two and a bit hours of the race, he was given four soft Michelin tyres rather than a set of mediums. Ferrari admitted that the harder of the two compounds Michelin brought to Italy would almost certainly have been the faster option. But with its weather forecast suggesting there was going to be light rain – erroneously, as it turned out – it wanted to be on the softer tyre.

“We were really worried about some drops of rain, which mean you are very exposed if you are on the medium,” explained Pier Guidi, who together with his team-mates in #51 got a first WEC victory on the board since the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2023. “Maybe it was not the perfect compound, but it was quite okay because the temperatures were falling. I started quite slowly, not using the peak to save the tyres as much as I could.”

The strategy worked for the winning car, but not the customer entry in which Hanson was joined by Yifei Ye and Robert Kubica. Kubica, who had taken over from Ye with just under three hours to go, found himself down in fifth after the final safety car and could do nothing about Dries Vanthoor in the #15 BMW ahead of him. The time lost resulted in what has to be regarded as a disappointing fourth-place finish for the yellow Ferrari.

“If you are in free air and you can nurse the tyres, they work really well,” explained Giuliano Salvi, chief race engineer at the 499P programme. “If you are in a dogfight, it is really easy to overheat them. It’s a fine line.”

If Ferrari decided that discretion was the better part of valour, the two manufacturers that took the remaining podium positions decided to get creative on strategy in the final stages. BMW and Alpine, which in Imola equalled the best results so far with their respective LMDh challengers, chose the same option on fuel, though not on tyres, on the way to second and third respectively, 8.5s and 12.5s down on the winning car.

The off-kilter tactics got van der Linde and Schumacher in clean air and allowed them to make the most of the fresh tyres and the low fuel load

BMW billed its race with the #20 M Hybrid V8 shared by Rene Rast, Robin Frijns and Sheldon van der Linde as a “tactical masterclass”. It was hard to disagree given that the second-placed car lost a dozen or so seconds in the pits for a change of rear deck after a clash early in the third hour. An “inspired strategy” was the term Alpine used to describe its run to third with the #36 A424 shared by Frederic Makowiecki, Jules Gounon and Mick Schumacher. Same difference.

BMW and Alpine, and their respective WRT and Signatech teams, opted to short fuel at the penultimate pitstop, effectively splitting the last portion of the race after the final safety car into two equal halves. This period of yellows was preceded by a Virtual Safety Car during which the pits remained open, forcing everyone’s hand to come in and make a ‘free’ pitstop.

There were still two and a quarter hours left on the clock, which meant going to the end on a single stop wasn’t an option. The conventional strategy, the one adopted by the winning Ferrari for example, was to take a full dump of fuel and then duck into the pits for splash-and-dash in the closing stages.

Adjusting fuel strategy to utilise clean air set-up a podium attack for the #20 BMW and the #36 Alpine

Photo by: Andreas Beil

The off-kilter tactics got van der Linde and Schumacher in clean air and allowed them to make the most of the fresh tyres and the low fuel load. There was a key difference between the strategies they adopted, however: BMW went for the medium Michelin and Alpine the soft.

The strategy, explained Gounon, gave Schumacher a “very light car” and “amazing pace”. Alpine got the most out of the softs after Gounon had run them over the previous two stints in less favourable temperatures: it now understood the pressures required. “The soft at the end with a short fill was an amazing call by the team,” said Gounon. “It was what bought us onto the podium today.”

Toyota also opted for a divergent strategy on a day it didn’t have the pace of the Ferrari nor luck on its side. Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Sebastien Bumei ended up fifth in the #8 GR010 HYBRID LMH despite a drive-through penalty incurred by the first named for speeding under the FCY. “It was as good as we could do,” reckoned Buemi, who fought a tenacious rear-guard action to hold off Antonio Fuoco in the #50 Ferrari during the final hour.

The Swiss might actually have been wrong on that one. The time lost defending his position against a faster car must have cost Buemi more than the three seconds by which he trailed Kubica at the finish.

A podium might have been possible too, but for the battle that ended when Fuoco made an ambitious attempt to go around the outside into the Tamburello chicane. Contact was made, with the Italian car skipping through the gravel and on towards the pits to change a left-rear puncture – and a lowly 15th in the final results. On a point of interest, Alpine’s predictions early in the final hour were suggesting it was on course to finish behind the Toyota and the Ferrari.

Porsche was the other manufacturer that looked as though it might leave Italy with some silverware. The best of the Porsche Penske Motorsport 963 LMDhs shared by Laurens Vanthoor, Matt Campbell and Kevin Estre ended up eighth, but could and probably should have been higher. Vanthoor hinted that it didn’t get its tyre strategy quite right over the final two hours. A podium could have been possible for a car that led the race as late as the third hour, Vanthoor suggested. It really was that tight in the battle for the podium positions among what was cheekily called the “midfield” by Rast. “It was very close between Toyota, Alpine, us and Porsche,” he reckoned.

And of the Ferrari? “They were obviously very fast. We couldn’t keep up with them.”

Despite the open competition behind it, the #51 Ferrari rarely looked challenged for victory

Photo by: Andreas Beil