When Alessandro Pier Guidi one day hangs up his helmet, he may well look back on the 2024 season with his head in his hands. The factory Ferrari ace was comfortably leading the WEC Spa 6 Hours in May when Earl Bamber’s crash triggered a red flag that turned the race on its head and sparked a lengthy appeal process only recently resolved. The eventual third place in the 499P Le Mans Hypercar was somehow less galling than finishing runner-up at the Spa 24 Hours, having led until his route into the pits was blocked by a conked out Lamborghini in the final hour.
Last weekend’s GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup round at Monza was the latest race Pier Guidi had reason to think was in the bag. His AF Corse-run 296 GT3 was the fastest thing around the place – Pier Guidi’s fastest lap set on the 85th of 87 tours was 0.637s quicker than anyone else managed – and on any other day would surely have converted pole position into victory with Alessio Rovera and Vincent Abril.
But instead, an outcome nobody saw coming will be what the race is remembered for: a first outright win for a car outside the Pro class in history, with a bronze driver in the line-up to boot.
WRT BMW crew Jens Klingmann, Sam De Haan and Ahmad Al Harthy delivered what could fairly be described as the year’s biggest sportscar racing upset having started 29th in the 51-car field. The trio’s best finish of the year to date had been 27th….
It was all made possible by a pre-event rule change, stipulating that teams must make three mandatory stops instead of the usual two. A statement provided to Autosport from series organiser SRO said: “It became clear from data gathered during Thursday's test session that the race could not be completed with two refuelling pitstops, as a three-hour Endurance Cup round normally would.
“This was due to a combination of Monza’s new and faster track surface, GT3’s 120-litre fuel limit as mandated by the FIA, and the sustainable fuel introduced at the start of 2024. It was therefore necessary to add a third mandatory pitstop, albeit one without driver or tyre changes.”
Typically events of this duration are split into three event segments, limiting strategic variation, a point that WRT sporting director Kurt Mollekens admits it has lobbied SRO over “because they are narrowing everything down so much that there is hardly any space to be creative with anything”. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that when the bulletin notifying teams of the change dropped, WRT immediately began plotting how it could best take advantage.
One of the ideas put forward and subsequently adopted, was that in the event of an early safety car it could get all its mandatory timed stops out of the way at the start. That De Haan copped damage in the opening lap shenanigans that put the race under caution for 15 minutes made its decision a formality.
Mollekens explains: “From then on, all of our stops would be against the clock, no more mandatory fuel time, just the fuel that we needed to get through the stint, because you have minimum/maximum driving times [of 45 and 50 minutes] also to respect. But the big thing was to avoid the 44 seconds of fuel. We knew that we were going to win about 20 seconds per stop.”
But it was not a plan without risk, Mollekens adds: “It was something definitely worth trying, but not in all sorts of positions. It was not something we did with the #46 [featuring Raffaele Marciello, Valentino Rossi and Maxime Martin] that was running P3. You can lose track position when you're running at the back.
“That obviously added to the excitement. I think this one will go in the books as a race that will be remembered for some time”
Kurt Mollekens
“You don't know who is going to be in that field who may have a technical issue and run very slow, yet defend his position for his life, or whether it's a rather quick race and everybody runs that similar pace and you remain quite close.
“There is a base plan before you go into the race, but once you're in it, there's a lot of factors that may influence the outcome. It was a rather exhausting exercise for the engineers.”
Mollekens says WRT’s mission control cottoned on around halfway through the race that the victory could be on the cards for its Bronze Cup car, which was eventually secured when Klingmann passed team-mate Dries Vanthoor (on the same strategy after his Pro car started by Sheldon van der Linde was embroiled in the first corner chaos) exiting the first chicane with 11 minutes to go.
Vanthoor had just emerged from his final pitstop in the net lead and therefore became the stopper in the bottle when Pier Guidi charged up onto their tail. This happened so quickly that there was no opportunity for WRT to consider orchestrating a positional swap to benefit van der Linde, Vanthoor and Charles Weerts, who would have otherwise entered the Jeddah Endurance Cup finale only 14 points off the lead instead of 21. Vanthoor's robust defence at the second chicane meant Pier Guidi had to take to the run-off and cede the position, securing a 1-2 for WRT.
“That obviously added to the excitement,” observes Mollekens. “I think this one will go in the books as a race that will be remembered for some time.”
Evidently though, not everybody was quite so chipper about the result. Mollekens recognises “when you were walking across the paddock after the race, there was not a lot of happy people in there”, with the ashen-faced defeated Ferrari crew chief among them.
Pier Guidi’s team-mate Rovera said: “With this new regulation, the cards were reshuffled throughout the weekend. I must admit that it favoured teams at the back: they got lucky and took risks that we couldn’t afford to, being in first place.”
WRT is firmly in favour of seeing “a bit more flexibility in the whole strategy area in the championship”, Mollekens says, but whether this turns into anything more than a one-off should be a topic given serious thought.
“Providing teams with this strategic window of opportunity undoubtedly made for an entertaining conclusion,” SRO’s statement concluded. “But it is too early to say whether these pitstop regulations – which originated from a situation of force majeure – will become commonplace.”
Tight limits on stint lengths is one way of keeping the racing close. It ensures that passes are done on track and rewards the fastest crews. Mollekens probably has a point too when suggesting that the greater strategic variation could have made it harder for spectators to follow.
But endurance racing has always been more than just on-track performance and in a Balance of Performance series, clever strategy is one area that teams can gain a key edge.
That’s what makes British GT’s Silverstone round the true highlight of its season; electing to get a mandatory stop completed at the end of the first lap was a winning tactic in the race for Barwell in 2016; it repeated the feat after a lap two stop in 2020.
Often races won by inspired strategy calls are among the more memorable even without an underdog fairytale story. This writer thinks back to Von Ryan Racing’s victory in what was then called the Blancpain Endurance Series at Silverstone in 2015 that owed much to a superb fuel-saving effort from Shane van Gisbergen, who climbed in ahead of schedule during a full course yellow and stretched his stint out to over 70 minutes.
Now, thanks to WRT’s ingenuity, the topic of strategic variance can no longer be ignored
Although it didn’t ultimately yield a win, WRT finishing second at Silverstone in 2016 despite lacking the ultimate pace is another race that team boss Vincent Vosse remembers fondly after it exploited a loophole in the regulations determining minimum pitstop times and short-fuelled. “Vincent compared this situation to back then,” notes Mollekens.
Even if the rules are only aligned with Monza for the three-hour races, which this year made up three of the five Endurance rounds, a greater degree of flexibility would add more layers of intrigue and afford more opportunities for special moments, of which last weekend was undoubtedly one.
SRO can rightly capitalise on its new piece of history being written as it prepares for the maiden voyage to Jeddah. Now, thanks to WRT’s ingenuity, the topic of strategic variance can no longer be ignored.
