The FIA World Endurance Championship’s second full season was a good reflection on its first in 2012. Car counts remained relatively stable (28-32 cars) as there were a few new cars or entrants, but there were still a couple quirks during the year.
Audi, inevitably, took six of the eight overall victories in LMP1 and Allan McNish, Tom Kristensen and new full-time recruit Loic Duval swept to the Driver’s Championship. Duval’s presence pushed McNish and Kristensen even more and the three were all on top of their games to win at Le Mans. The second car of twice-defending Le Mans champs Andre Lotterer, Benoit Treluyer and Marcel Fassler matched the No. 2 car’s win total of three wins apiece, although failed to score as highly in the races it didn’t win. Toyota won twice, albeit one was the water-logged Fuji race that finished after only 16 laps under a red flag. Rebellion was the only privateer that lasted the season, as Strakka Racing dropped out after Le Mans. New regulations and cars will come for 2014, and be explained further in due course.
LMP2 belonged to former or current open-wheel stars, now plying their trade in prototypes. Thanks to their Le Mans victory which highlighted their season, OAK Racing’s trio of Martin Plowman, Bertrand Baguette and Ricardo Gonzalez took the Driver’s Championship in their Morgan Nissan. Outright fastest driver most of the time was Mike Conway for G-Drive Racing; Conway and co-drivers John Martin and Roman Rusinov won four of the last five races but an exclusion at Le Mans cost them the title. Delta-ADR and Pecom Racing (like G-Drive, with Oreca 03 Nissans) won the year’s first two rounds but faltered from there.
GTE Pro saw AF Corse Ferrari split its usual driver lineup for the season finale in Bahrain to give the team the best chance of capturing the Driver’s title, and Gianmaria Bruni delivered the championship with a win in the last race. Bruni drove with Giancarlo Fisichella all year except Bahrain and the fellow Italian was second in points; hard-luck losers in class were Aston Martin’s pair of Stefan Mucke and Darren Turner in third. Porsche led a 1-2 with its new Team Manthey-run 911 RSRs at Le Mans, but otherwise struggled for balance and outright pace in the first year with its new car.
Aston was able to capture the GTE Am class title, albeit in the hands of two drivers you’d hardly call “amateurs” in English veterans Jamie Campbell-Walter and Stuart Hall. The class is designed to have a mix of Silver and Bronze drivers in two of the three seats and a late-year regulation change required at least one Bronze, but those drivers classified as Silver were still eligible to compete. As it was, that pair won the Driver’s title by just one point over 8Star Ferrari’s true pro-am pairing of Rui Aguas and Enzo Potolicchio. Consolation for 8Star was the fact it took the team’s championship.
Naturally the biggest and probably worst story of the year for the WEC, more than its on-track product, was the death of Danish driver Allen Simonsen at Le Mans. Simonsen’s car went into the guardrail at Tertre Rouge, and the hope is that safety updates are made in that portion of the circuit. Otherwise, the world championship continues to press ahead into 2014 as a proving ground for innovation and technology which isn’t necessarily seen in FIA’s flagship championship, Formula One.
