Last week, we reported that the Toyota TS030 hybrid race car earned its maiden pole position for the weekend's FIA World Endurance Championship 6 Hours of Sao Paulo.
Equal parts optimistic and cautious about the car's performance, Alex Wurz expressed after his stellar qualifying, "Obviously it is a long race but to get pole position is a great feeling and it shows the car is very competitive. I am optimistic but don't forget this is only our third race; it will be a difficult race against strong competition but we will go full attack tomorrow."
As the race unfolded on Saturday, it turns out that Alex Wurz, team co-driver Nicolas Lapierre, and the Toyota TS030 would be unstoppable. Other than a brief Audi lead during the first round of pit stops, the Toyota led the whole race from lights to flag. As the race unfolded, it was clear that Toyota had the advantage of all out pace while the two Audis had the advantage of completing more laps between pit stops.
After the six-hour high speed chess game, the top three overall winners all finished on the same lap. Chasing from a minute behind was the No. 1 Audi R18 e-tron quattro driven by André Lotterer, Marcel Fässler, and Benoît Tréyluyer. Next, the No. 2 Audi R18 ultra driven by Allan McNish, Tom Kristensen and Lucas di Grassi trailed from only 14 seconds behind.
After the fantastic result, Alex Wurz expressed during the press conference, "Thanks to Nico and the team, they have been pushing really hard all weekend. To be honest we didn't know about the fuel strategy, the safety car helped us a bit but we still had to do a splash. The key today was tyre management, especially in the second stint, which gave us the upper hand on our competitors. We also did a lot of work on the setup and drivers side too. Whether we can be competitive in Bahrain, Fuji and Shanghai, Kinoshita San summed it up earlier this year at the Le Mans press conference, 'you watch, we push'."
Team co-driver Nicolas Lapierre also said, "It's fantastic for the team. Since the beginning of the year we knew it was a fast car, but we struggled with reliability in Le Mans. At Silverstone we showed our pace and we came away with the second place. So coming here, Alex did a wonderful job in qualifying getting our first pole position and then we were able to pull away. We were very good on tyre management and we had a faultless race, which brought us to this win in only our third race."
Moving on, the WEC series heads to Bahrain in September 29th next for the sixth round of the championship.
