Toyota Gazoo Racing’s Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez have clinched the 2021 Hypercar FIA World Endurance Championship title after finishing runner-up at the Bapco 8 Hours of Bahrain, the final round of this year’s FIA WEC.
It has been a near-perfect year for Toyota Gazoo Racing as last week the Japanese team claimed the first-ever Hypercar World Endurance Championship title with one round of the season still remaining. They also become the first team in WEC history to maintain a 100% win rate in a season.
Going into the final race, it was an outright duel between the No. 7 and No. 8 sister cars as both crews were separated by 16 points – the former having the advantage and needing only to finish in the top three in order to become champions.
The race eventually went the way of the No. 8 car after Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Kazuki Nakajima put in a flawless performance at the wheel of the Toyota GR010 Hybrid Hypercar. During the race itself, pole-sitter Conway led the early stages but handed the position over to the sister car in the second hour. The No. 8 car went on to finish the race 7.35s ahead of the No. 7 car.
It was a fitting end to Nakajima’s WEC career as the Japanese driver crossed the finish line to increase his WEC victories to 17. Nakajima has been part of Toyota’s WEC team since the very first test of the TS030 Hybrid in January 2012.
Alpine Elf Matmut finish second in the Hypercar World Endurance Championship with a total of 108 points. The race started superbly for the French team, with Nicolas Lapierre passing Buemi and pole-sitter Mike Conway through the opening few corners.
However, Lapierre was soon overtaken by both Toyotas before a gearbox issue forced a lengthy pitstop for the No. 36 car on the 25th lap. As a result, the Alpine A480 Gibson lost three laps as the team worked hard to fix the issues.
The French squad (Lapierre, Andre Negrao and Matthieu Vaxiviere) did a good job of fighting back up the leaderboard through the remainder of the race, eventually finishing P3 and four laps down on the race winners.