The #27 Heart of Racing Vantage in the pits at Fuji, where the final-stop tire call set up its charge to second. Photo: Aston Martin Racing
For five and a half hours, the #27 Heart of Racing Aston Martin Vantage had the kind of 6 Hours of Fuji that ends up as a single line in a points table. It started 16th, lugged 18kg of success ballast earned by its win at the Circuit of the Americas, served a pit-lane penalty, and then got caught up in the accident that produced a lengthy Safety Car, picking up a punctured left rear on the way.
It finished 1.062 seconds off the LMGT3 win.
Most of that recovery happened in the final 20 minutes, and it hinged on a pit-lane decision rather than a heroic stint: at the last fuel stop, Mattia Drudi took three fresh Goodyears while several cars around him kept the tires they already had. That call turned eighth into second. It also kept Ian James, Zach Robichon and Drudi mathematically alive in a title fight that the official table says is harder than Aston Martin’s own post-race arithmetic suggests.
Fresh rubber beat track position, twice
The final phase at Fuji was effectively a 20-minute sprint bolted onto a six-hour race. Barrier repairs at the entry to Turn 1 held the field behind the Safety Car into the closing half-hour, so every team faced the same choice at its last stop: keep the track position and run old tires to the flag, or spend a few seconds in the box for grip.
Conditions made that choice less obvious than it sounds. The restart came on a slightly damp track, and cold tires on a greasy surface are exactly when a car on used rubber can look clever for a lap or two. The catch is that 20 minutes is plenty of time for a fresh set to come in, and the cars that gambled on staying out were sitting ducks once it did.
The #27 was not the only proof. The race-winning #32 Team WRT BMW M4 of Augusto Farfus, Sean Gelael and Darren Leung also restarted outside the top five on fresh tires, and Farfus then picked off Nicky Catsburg in the #33 TF Sport Corvette before passing Charlie Eastwood’s #34 Racing Team Turkey by TF Corvette at Turn 10 for the lead. The #34 had led after the final stops by skipping tires; it held on for third, 4.676 seconds back. The two quickest cars at the flag were the two that bought grip. The car that bought track position got passed by both.
Drudi, who had spent his earlier running struggling with the car’s balance, was candid about where the late speed came from. “Because we were on new tyres I could use their potential,” he said afterward. He moved from eighth to second on the road after gaining two places in the stops, and ran out of laps to have a proper go at Farfus.
How the #27 got itself buried in the first place
The grid was a lottery before a wheel turned. Rain wiped out every qualifying session on Saturday, so the order was set from practice times, which put the #27 16th. That also meant no pole-position bonus point for anyone at Fuji, a detail that matters more than usual this late in the season.
James did the heavy lifting early, carrying the Vantage up to third through his opening stints despite the ballast, before a pit-lane penalty undid that work. The team hasn’t said what the penalty was for, and the car had dropped to eighth by the time Robichon handed over.
Drudi’s stint was the low point until it wasn’t. Short on pace and fighting around the edge of the top ten, he tangled with Finn Gehrsitz’s #58 Garage 59 McLaren just as the final hour began. The McLaren’s accident at Turn 1 was heavy enough to bring out the race’s second Safety Car, and Gehrsitz walked away from it. The Aston escaped with a puncture. Because the field was about to spend a long time running slowly behind the Safety Car while the barriers were fixed, the timing of that damage limited how much ground a trip to the pits could cost.
The official table says 24 points, not 14
Aston Martin’s post-race release says the #27 trio sit 14 points off the lead. The FIA WEC’s published standings tell a less comfortable story. After six of eight rounds, the FIA Endurance Trophy for LMGT3 Drivers reads:
- 1. Jonny Edgar (#33 TF Sport Corvette): 86 points
- 2. Nicky Catsburg (#33): 82
- 3. Ben Keating (#33): 64
- 4. Ian James, Mattia Drudi, Zach Robichon (#27 Heart of Racing Aston Martin): 62
- 5. Charlie Eastwood, Peter Dempsey, Salih Yoluç (#34 Racing Team Turkey by TF Corvette): 58
The LMGT3 Teams’ standings match that gap: TF Sport’s #33 on 86, the Heart of Racing #27 second on 62. That is a 24-point deficit.
The round-by-round split explains why the Vantage is chasing at all. The #27 has scored 0, 18, 1, 0, 25 and 18 across Imola, Spa, Le Mans, Interlagos, COTA and Fuji. The #33 has scored 18, 4, 50, 4, 0 and 10. On a normal weekend, the Aston has been the more productive car lately: it has outscored the Corvette 43–10 across the last two rounds alone. But Le Mans pays double, and the #33 won it. The #27 took pole there and left with a single bonus point. That one week accounts for 49 points of swing, more than double the current deficit.
What the #27 needs from Barcelona and Monza
Two six-hour races remain, each worth 25 points for a win plus one for pole. That caps the #27’s haul at 52 and its best possible total at 114. The problem is that the Corvette doesn’t have to do much to cover it: two third-place finishes would take the #33 to 116 even if the Vantage won both races from pole. The Aston can’t win this on its own. It needs the #33 to have a bad weekend, and it needs that weekend to come early.
The simplest marker to watch: if the gap is bigger than 26 points after Barcelona, the Teams’ title is gone before Monza starts. Right now it is 24. With qualifying back on the schedule, that single pole point becomes a live strategic asset, not a footnote.
Barcelona runs October 16–18 and is the first WEC round ever held in Spain, so nobody arrives with a setup notebook from a previous visit; Monza follows November 6–8. For a crew carrying success ballast into both, a new track is at least a level playing field on data, even if not on weight. Also keep an eye on the #34 Corvette, which sits four points behind the Aston and shares a TF operation with the leaders. If TF Sport can use its second car to take points away from the #27, it will.
Fuji keeps being kind to this car
By Aston Martin’s own count, Sunday was the Vantage’s 17th podium at Fuji across five generations of the car, seven of them wins, and only four WEC races at the circuit have finished without a Vantage crew on the GT podium. It was also the Vantage’s fifth WEC LMGT3 podium of 2026. None of that history came with a guarantee this time. It took a penalty, a crash, a puncture and a tire call to produce second place, and a little help from a race that ran long enough behind the Safety Car to reward a gamble.
Up front overall, Toyota took the Hypercar win at home, which we covered in Monday’s motorsport roundup after previewing the Le Mans winner’s trip to Fuji. For how performance balancing is shaping the sportscar arguments on the other side of the Pacific, see our look at Porsche Penske’s BoP complaint.
About the Author
