Toyota’s TR010 Hybrids ran first and second for most of the 6 Hours of Barcelona. Photo: Toyota Racing
Kamui Kobayashi had two jobs at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on Sunday. As team principal of Toyota Racing, he watched his team clinch the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship manufacturers’ title with a round to spare. As one of the drivers of the #7 TR010 Hybrid, he finished 0.583 seconds behind the team’s other car and left Spain 17 points down in a drivers’ championship that only Toyota can still win.
The first job is done. The second gets settled at Monza on Nov. 8, and the boss has already said Toyota will race that one without team orders.
Eight titles, and the first under a new name
Barcelona gave Toyota its eighth WEC manufacturers’ crown in 14 seasons and its fifth since the Hypercar class took over from LMP1 in 2021. It’s also the first title under the Toyota Racing banner and the first for the TR010 Hybrid. In its debut season, the car has won four races, including Le Mans and the team’s home round at Fuji.
The comeback matters more than the count. Ferrari took both world titles in 2025, and Toyota isn’t pretending last year went well. Kobayashi and Sébastien Buemi both pointed to that season afterward, and credited the winter spent bringing the TR010 Hybrid to the grid for the turnaround.
The standings aren’t close anymore. Toyota took 43 points out of Spain with the one-two. BMW, second in the manufacturers’ table after Fuji, got seventh from the #15 M Hybrid V8 and nothing from the #20, which climbed as high as second before a tire-pressure penalty. It was classified 14th, two laps down, and hasn’t scored in three straight races.
The first hour, on wet tires, decided it
Barcelona was only added to the calendar this year (here’s how it got there), and the first 6 Hours there started on a wet track after two dry days. Starts like that reward tire warm-up and confidence more than raw pace. Michelin had already flagged Barcelona as one of its toughest weekends of the year before the rain showed up.
Genesis Magma Racing had pole with André Lotterer in the #19, a big moment for the new program. It lasted about five corners. Teammate Dani Juncadella and Buemi both got past Lotterer into Turn 1, and Lotterer then ran through the Turn 5 gravel and dropped to the back of the Hypercar field. Buemi, who started second in his 100th WEC race, took the lead early and the #8 held it for most of the day.
The drive that said more about the car came from the #7. Nyck de Vries started ninth and was up to second around the one-hour mark after passing Miguel Molina’s #50 Ferrari. Gaining seven places on a cold, wet track is where a car’s tire window and a driver’s confidence show up together. Brendon Hartley admitted the team hadn’t tested at Barcelona and didn’t expect to be this strong. The missing test data didn’t seem to matter much.
A start penalty that cost nothing
Buemi’s start wasn’t clean. The #8 got a five-second penalty for a start procedure infringement and served it at its second pit stop. In WEC, a time penalty served in the pits means the car sits stationary for those seconds before the crew can work on it, so it costs real time on track.
It didn’t matter. At half-distance, Hartley led Kobayashi by 10 seconds and the rest of the field was more than 20 seconds behind. Buemi said he was still annoyed with himself about the start, and that his teammates had made up for it.
The safety car was the real test
A gap built over four hours can disappear in one restart. A safety car with two hours to go erased Toyota’s cushion and put the chasing Ferraris and Cadillacs right behind the TR010s. Toyota responded by setting new fastest laps with both cars after the green and pulling clear again through lapped traffic.
That makes 39.725 seconds the number worth remembering. It was the gap from Ryō Hirakawa in the winning #8 to the third-place #50 Ferrari of Antonio Fuoco, Molina and Nicklas Nielsen, and Toyota built nearly all of it after the safety car reset the field. The 0.583 seconds between the Toyotas at the flag says nothing about pace. It just shows two cars from the same garage bringing a championship home. Hirakawa put it plainly: “There was no luck, we just grabbed it.”
Behind the Ferrari, Cadillac Hertz Team Jota’s #38 of Jack Aitken, Earl Bamber and Sébastien Bourdais made an offset strategy work for fourth. It held off the #83 AF Corse Ferrari of Robert Kubica, Phil Hanson and Yifei Ye by 0.542 seconds. The #12 Cadillac finished sixth.
From pole to 11th, and the champions down in 15th
It went worse further back. Both Genesis cars finished outside the points after a run of problems and mistakes, the #19 in 11th and the #17 in 16th. The #51 Ferrari, which won last year’s drivers’ title, finished 15th, three laps down, and that ended its title defense. BMW’s title hopes are effectively over as well.
Monza: the math, and the boss in the other car
Buemi, Hartley and Hirakawa came to Barcelona with 89 points to the #7 crew’s 79. Toyota’s first and second places made that 114 to 97.
A Monza win pays 25 points, and pole is worth one more. So even in the #7’s best case, a win from pole, the #8 is champion if it finishes fifth or better. Kobayashi, Mike Conway and de Vries need to win and have their teammates finish sixth or lower. Without the pole point, sixth for the #8 only produces a tie on points.
That leaves Toyota in an unusual position: its team principal is driving the car that has to catch up. Kobayashi has dealt with the obvious conflict by saying there will be no team orders at Monza. With the manufacturers’ title already won, that’s the right call. It also puts more weight on the strategists. With both cars free to race, a badly timed stop, or a safety car on the wrong side of the pit cycle, could decide the drivers’ title. We looked at how the two Toyota crews lined up against each other before Barcelona, and the gap has only grown since.
Hartley said he wasn’t thinking about the drivers’ title yet. He has about three weeks before he has to.
LMGT3: Seven races, seven winners
The GT class stayed unpredictable. The Bend Manthey #92 Porsche 911 GT3 R of Richard Lietz, Riccardo Pera and Yasser Shahin won by 4.750 seconds over Garage 59’s #10 McLaren, with Team WRT’s #69 BMW third. That’s seven different LMGT3 winners in seven rounds this year. Manthey is still in the hunt for a third straight title, but TF Sport has the advantage going into the finale and has to finish the job.
What to watch at Monza
- Fifth place: That’s all the #8 needs to finish for the drivers’ title, whatever the #7 does.
- Toyota’s pit wall: With no team orders, look for whether the two cars run split strategies or mirror each other. Splitting them is how the #7 creates a chance.
- Ferrari at home: The #50 was the closest challenger in Spain, 39.7 seconds back. Monza is Ferrari’s best chance to end the season with a win.
- Genesis: Barcelona showed it can take pole. Now it needs to finish a race near the front.
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