Ferrari finally snapped its longest winless run in FIA World Endurance Championship history at the Lone Star Le Mans, but the version of this race that actually moves the championship needle happened behind the No. 50 499P. Toyota lost a race it had all but won with ten minutes left on the clock. Alpine got its own car relegated by the stewards. And Cadillac, three seasons into its Hypercar program, finally strung together the result it has been promising all year: a runner-up finish for the No. 38 Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA V-Series.R at its home race.
Nyck de Vries spent most of six hours under the Texas sun doing exactly what a championship leader is supposed to do: keep the No. 7 Toyota TR010 Hybrid at the front and deny everyone else clean racing air. He had it, too, building a six-second cushion over Ferrari’s Miguel Molina with the finish in sight, until a hydraulic pressure failure ended his, Kamui Kobayashi’s and Mike Conway’s afternoon in the garage. That is not a small footnote. Circuit of the Americas is one of only four tracks in FIA WEC history where Toyota has never won, and a mechanical failure this late, this close to breaking that streak, says more about where the TR010 program stands in its third season than any single qualifying lap could.
Ferrari inherited both the lead and the win, its first of 2026, ending a drought stretching back to last year’s Qatar season opener for Molina, Antonio Fuoco and Nicklas Nielsen. The strategy that got the No. 50 there is worth noting for anyone who thinks Hypercar racing comes down to raw pace on a given Saturday: the crew ran an offset strategy, pitting early at the 50-minute mark to jump from fifth to third, then simply had the composure to hold position through two Safety Cars and three Full Course Yellow periods that scrambled almost everyone else’s plans. Clean racing, no mistakes, and the patience to let a quicker rival beat itself.
Which brings us to Cadillac. The No. 38 crew of Jack Aitken, Sébastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber started from the front row and spent the race running at the front on merit rather than just surviving to a decent finish, something Cadillac’s Hypercar program has struggled to do consistently since it joined the grid. Bamber said the trio led at one stage and clawed back a strategy disadvantage caused by Virtual Safety Car timing twice before the chequered flag. They crossed the line third on the road and were promoted to second when stewards handed the No. 35 Alpine of Charles Milesi, António Félix da Costa and Ferdinand Habsburg a five-second penalty for an unsafe release. It is a small, procedural penalty with an outsized effect: the rule exists because releasing a car into pit lane traffic without a clear gap is one of the more dangerous moments in a six-hour race, and this one cost Alpine a shot at second while still leaving them with their first podium of the season.
The more interesting half of Cadillac’s weekend was the No. 12 crew. Ricky Taylor, Norman Nato and Will Stevens qualified 15th and ran an alternate, out-of-sync pit strategy specifically to avoid getting stuck in traffic behind the identical cars around them, a tactic that only pays off if the drivers can actually execute the recovery. Stevens’ late stint was aggressive enough to draw a five-second penalty of its own for leaving the track and gaining an advantage, but it built enough of a buffer to hold ninth outright and seventh in class regardless. Two Cadillacs, two different strategies, both banking points toward the manufacturers’ table.
Zoom out and the championship picture got considerably messier. With neither the points-leading No. 7 Toyota nor the No. 20 BMW scoring, de Vries, Kobayashi and Conway remain tied atop the Drivers’ standings with BMW’s René Rast and Robin Frijns, and Ferrari’s win has turned the Manufacturers’ title into a three-way fight with three rounds left to run. Sébastien Buemi, who left Envision’s Formula E line-up this year to focus on this kind of factory sportscar programme, muscled the No. 8 Toyota up to sixth late on. Aston Martin’s Valkyrie quietly matched its best-ever Hypercar result with fourth for Harry Tincknell and Tom Gamble, a reminder that the grid is only getting deeper as manufacturers like Ford prepare to join it.
Michelin supplies every Hypercar on the grid under a tyre deal that now runs through 2032, which is worth remembering here: the calls being made under yellow at COTA were about traffic, fuel windows and track position, not compound gambles. That is what made the No. 12’s recovery a strategy and execution story rather than a tyre story, and it is why Cadillac’s engineers will be poring over both cars’ data rather than just celebrating the trophy.
The series heads to Japan next for the 6 Hours of Fuji on September 25-27, the first of three rounds that will decide both titles. Toyota needs answers on reliability before then. Cadillac needs to prove Texas was not a one-off.
Jack Aitken, Sébastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber celebrate the No. 38 Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA V-Series.R’s runner-up finish at the Lone Star Le Mans. Photo: Cadillac Racing / General Motors.
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