Sebastien Buemi told reporters and media that Toyota took ‘a lot of risk’ on the way to winning not only the FIA World Endurance Championship’s season finale, the 8 Hours of Bahrain, but the manufacturers’ world title too.
“We decided to start on the medium tires for the race,” Buemi began.
‘It’s not something we usually do here, because we have a lot of degradation, but in FP3, we have the feeling that the mediums were actually working quite well.
‘Knowing that only one of the car had to do a great result, we decided to take the risk on our car, to start on the medium knowing it was a lot of risk.
‘And to be honest, I was managing the pace at the beginning. I didn’t want to pull out a gap because obviously if we have a safety car, you’ve just damaged the tires for nothing,’ he said.
Buemi’s teammate in the #8 Toyota GR010 Hybrid, Brendon Hartley, qualified the car on pole the previous day. The Swiss driver retained the lead at the start, with the Ferrari of Antonio Giovinazzi behind him, but the first incident of Toyota’s topsy-turvy race was just around the corner.
‘I was nicely under control. But when the contact happened with the Corvette — and by the way, I felt I had left enough space — but when that happened, I obviously have to catch back. It was 20 laps behind the BMW — it really damaged the tires,” he said.
The contact Buemi mentioned was with #82 TF Sport Corvette driver Hiroshi Koizumi. They clashed at turn 1 as Buemi was overtaking the LMGT3 car, spinning Buemi around and dropping him to eighth.
A winning stint for Toyota and Buemi
‘We knew the mediums was would struggle, but I think the only way to get those mediums to work would have been to stay ahead, which I think I would have been able to do.
‘So then I struggled. We cut the second stint a little bit shorter, we put brand new with medium tires, and then the medium from qualifying.
‘We wanted to get those tyres from qualifying out of the way, just to make sure towards the end of the race, we were gonna have brand new tyres.
‘We knew the #5 [Porsche] was changing three tyres at the pit stop. So we knew at some point, they would struggle with the tyres. It’s always a long game in this type of racing.
‘So obviously jumping back in, thanks to my teammate, I have tyres that were slightly fresher than the competition. And I think we did a good job in making sure I was able to pass them.
Buemi was replaced in the car by Brendon Hartley, who was in turn replaced by Hirakawa. Buemi then climbed back in the car for the final two hours, and chased down Matt Campbell in the #5 Porsche, passing him at turn 8 and going onto win by almost 28 seconds, as Campbell struggled with older tyres, as Toyota had predicted. All this played out on live TV as the Japanese marque clinched yet another WEC title.
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