The car that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June did not drive itself to Japan. It was loaded into a glass-sided trailer and led out of Tokyo at night by a convoy of Toyota road cars, and the World Endurance Championship put the footage out on 22 September with the caption “Special cargo needs a special convoy.” It is a genuinely good piece of promotion. It is also a reminder that the Le Mans-winning TR010 Hybrid arriving at Fuji Speedway this week is the only Toyota there with nothing left to prove.
Toyota Motor Corporation has owned Fuji Speedway since 2000, which makes this the one weekend of the year where the manufacturer supplies the cars, the crowd, the tarmac and the truck. The 6 Hours of Fuji runs 25–27 September as round six of eight, with 35 entries split between 17 Hypercars and 18 LMGT3 machines. Two of those Hypercars are Toyotas. Neither is the one in the glass box.
Strip out Le Mans and Toyota is third
The headline number looks healthy. Toyota leads the Hypercar manufacturers’ standings on 140 points, BMW has 131 and reigning champion Ferrari sits third on 114. Then you remember that Le Mans pays double.
Toyota’s June weekend was worth 80 manufacturer points by itself: 50 for the No. 7’s win and 30 for the No. 8’s third place. BMW came away with 37 including its pole bonus, Ferrari with 20. Delete that one race from the ledger and the table reads BMW 94, Ferrari 94, Toyota 60. Since Le Mans, Ferrari has outscored Toyota by 52 points to eight.
That is the awkward shape of a nine-point lead built in a single weekend at La Sarthe, and it explains why the dead heat in the drivers’ table is the number that actually matters. René Rast and Robin Frijns are level with Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries on 75 points each. Sheldon van der Linde, who shares the No. 20 BMW but scored nothing in the Imola opener, is on 65. Toyota’s No. 8 crew of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryō Hirakawa are on 64. Four crews sit within 11 points of each other with three races to run.
The failure Toyota has to explain to itself
Toyota did not lose that ground in Austin because it was slow. De Vries had hauled the No. 7 from fourth to the lead and was stacking fastest laps in the final hour when a hydraulic problem took out the power steering with barely ten minutes left. That is the expensive kind of failure. It arrives with no warning in the lap times, it cannot be driven around, and it hands the engineers a reliability question to answer before a home race rather than a pace question.
The No. 8 had its own miserable afternoon — an off-sequence first stop, time lost in traffic, a drive-through for pit-lane speeding and then a Virtual Safety Car that arrived just after a green-flag refuelling stop and dropped it to 14th — and still dragged itself back to sixth. That recovery is the only reason the manufacturers’ lead grew from five points to nine on a day Toyota brought home one car. Others happily collected what Toyota dropped.
Fuji does not reward the fast lap
Fuji is a strange place to gamble a title. At 4.563km across 16 turns it is the second-shortest lap of the season, yet it carries one of the longest straights in the sport at 1.475km, which fires cars past 330km/h into a tight first corner that is both the circuit’s main passing place and its cheapest way to end a weekend. Put 35 cars on a lap that short and traffic stops being an irritation and becomes the strategy: every Hypercar stint here is a decision about which LMGT3 queue you would rather arrive behind.
The recent form guide agrees. Last year’s race was the first at Fuji in which no class winner started from the front three rows, and neither the 2024 nor the 2025 pole-sitter finished on the podium. Grid position here is a trophy, not a plan. Late-September weather in the Mount Fuji foothills is notoriously changeable, and because Michelin is the sole Hypercar tyre supplier through 2032, nobody can solve a cold morning or a wet afternoon by shopping for different rubber. Everyone gets the same compounds, which rewards whichever team reads the track fastest when conditions turn.
The streak Toyota would like to keep
Nine of the 12 WEC races held at Fuji have gone to Toyota, a 75 per cent strike rate at a circuit it happens to own. The catch is that the most recent of them came in 2023. Porsche won here in 2015 and again in 2024. Alpine won in 2025, in what happened to be the championship’s 100th event, and the A424 is the only Hypercar on this year’s grid with a 6 Hours of Fuji victory on its record.
The more telling streak is the debut one. Every new Toyota prototype has won its first race at this track: the TS030 Hybrid in 2012, the TS040 Hybrid in 2014, the TS050 Hybrid in 2016 and the GR010 Hybrid in 2022. The TR010 Hybrid has already won at Imola and Le Mans in its maiden season and has never raced here. A tenth Fuji win would keep a very tidy piece of company folklore alive — and would be worth considerably more than folklore in a championship this tight.
What to watch this weekend
Ferrari is the quiet problem. The 499P has been to Fuji three times and never finished on the podium, the only current venue where that is true, and it arrives fresh from winning in Texas. A defending champion fixing its worst circuit at the exact moment both leaders stumble is how titles change hands.
Cadillac has taken the last two Fuji Hyperpoles, but Alex Lynn, the driver who set both of them, is not in the car this time. Buemi is the only active driver with four outright wins at the circuit. Kobayashi, who also runs the team, holds the Hypercar qualifying lap record here, and de Vries has led each of the last two editions after taking his first WEC win at Fuji in LMP2 back in 2019. Loïc Duval, who owns the outright fastest race lap at the track, becomes only the ninth driver in championship history to reach 80 WEC starts on Sunday.
Hypercar qualifying starts at 14:40 local time on Saturday with Hyperpole at 15:00, and the race goes green at 11:00 on Sunday. After that, only Barcelona on 18 October and Monza on 8 November remain.
As for the car in the glass trailer, old race cars earn their keep in other ways now, and manufacturers have become far better at putting their own history back to work. The Le Mans-winning TR010 will spend the weekend being photographed. Everything that decides the 2026 title happens a couple of hundred metres away, in a pit garage Toyota also owns.
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