Toyota Gazoo won the Hypercar championship. JOTA took the LMP2 title, Ferrari won the GTE Pro championship, and TF Sport claimed the GTE AM division.
SHAKIR, Bahrain—Toyota Gazoo was the show’s star Saturday in Bahrain as the #8 car driven by Sebastian Buemi, Brendon Hartley, and Rio Hirakawa won the 8 Hours of Bahrain. Toyota’s #7 car, piloted by Mike Conway and teammates Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez, finished third. Alpine #93 was sandwiched between the Gazoo entries with Andre Negrao, Nicholas Lapierre, and Mathieu Vaxiviere driving.
Toyota (with 186 points) won the season-long Manufacturer’s title over Alpine (144 points). The American Glickenhaus team, which did not participate in Bahrain, completed the season in third place (70 points).
Buemi took the lead at the start with the Total Energies Peugeot, driven by Paul Di Resta, and Resta’s team challenged the Swiss for the first couple of hours. However, the French car did not last long, experiencing gear trouble issues, and retired early. Conway started getting much faster as the race progressed and, with the assistance of Kobyaschi, finally caught the Buemi entry and was then ordered to pass because the Toyota team felt that the Briton was much quicker.
In the LMP 2 division, the WRT Team car of Sean Gelael, Robin Frijins, and Rene Rast took the race win by dominating after leading in the third hour. But the JOTA entry, piloted by Antonio Felix de Costa, Roberto Gonzalez, and Will Stevens, won the title by finishing in third. Second went to the United Autosports team of Alex Lynn, Olivier Jarvis, and Josh Pierson.
In its final race, the GTE PRO group was expected to be a battle between the Porsches and Ferraris, which is what happened. The Porsches lost momentum midway through the race, and the disappointed team took third with Michael Christensen and Kevin Estre driving. The race went to Ferrari’s Antonio Fuoco and Miguel Molina, with teammates Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado taking the title. The Corvette Racing team worked hard to finish in second with Nick Tandy and Tommy Milner at the controls. Ferrari earned the GTE PRO title.
For the GTE AM cars, Team Project 1 earned their first 1-2 by having Matteo Cairoli, Niki Leutwiler, and Mikkel Pedersen finish ahead of their sister car, driven by Ben Barnicoat. Along with his teammates PJ Hyett and Gunnar Jeanette, the group took second, but only after Barnicoat passed the Iron Dames car, driven by Rahel Frey, with 70 minutes left in the race. The all-women team, which included Sarah Bovy and Michelle Gatting, ended up finishing third after leading most of the race in this division. TF Sport won the championship with Ben Keating and Marco Sorensen, who took the honors by finishing fourth in Bahrain.
