Guess Who's Back
Top-level international endurance racing's return to Imola presents numerous challenges for WEC competitors, and a chance for Peugeot to turn back the clock.
The World Endurance Championship (WEC) has no history at Imola's Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, but the same can't be said for top-level sports car racing. Factor that wrinkle in, and Peugeot enters April 22's 6 Hours of Imola as the track's reigning top-class endurance racing champion.
Team Peugeot Sport Total bagged the top two spots in July 2011's Six Hours of Imola. The race was the fourth round in the second and final season of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (ILMC). The factory-backed team's Peugeot 908s fared pretty well in the short-lived series, winning nine of 10 ILMC races and both season titles.
In 2012, the FIA-sanctioned WEC supplanted ILMC as the top intercontinental endurance racing series. Imola, which opened in 1953, was off the schedule, but it hosted a handful of European Le Mans events in the last dozen years. It's also a regular stop for feeder series that helped many drivers earn WEC rides.
That means not all 110 drivers in the 37-car field will be turning their first laps at the Northern Italian track best known for hosting 30 Formula 1 races. But even the ones who know it well have never experienced what Round 2 of the 2024 WEC season will bring: mixed-class racing among 19 top-tier LMH Hypercars and 18 LMGT3s on a very confining track.
“The circuit is basically the opposite of the one in Qatar," said Laurens Vanthoor, co-driver of Porsche Penske 963 No. 6 that won the March 2 WEC season-opener at Qatar's Lusail International circuit. "Old-school layout, real curbs, and hardly any run-off zones.”
Imola's 4.9km distance features 21 turns and a maximum straightaway length of 350m. Lusail is 5.4km long with 16 corners and a 1,068km main straightaway. The Italian track, originally designed for motorcycle racing, is also narrower and rougher than the 20-year-old Qatari circuit.
Imola’s configuration has several implications. Chief among them is traffic, which will be a major factor due to the track's narrow layout, limited run-off area and lack of long, straight stretches that give faster cars opportunities to pass. This could prove particularly frustrating for Hypercars looking to overtake slower LMGT3 entrants, particularly in the corners, where the speed differences are minimized.
“Definitely it’s going to be a hard track to pass--narrow, no real track limit situations,” Porsche No. 6 co-driver Kévin Estre told SportsCar 365. “If you decide to go on the outside and the GT car pushes you wide, you will end up on the grass and normally in the guard rail.”
As for Peugeot, repeating at Imola will be particularly daunting. Not only is the team looking for its first Hypercar-era win--its best finish is third in last year's 6 Hours of Monza--but Imola's WEC debut also marks the debut for Team Peugeot TotalEnergies’ updated 9X8.
The 2023 model 9X8, which battled poor reliability last season, was surprisingly strong in Qatar, missing out on a top-two result when a late-race mistake left the No. 93 car without enough fuel to finish.
The impressive showing combined with lessons learned and incorporated into the 2024 variant mean the two-car French team came to Italy with cautious optimism.
“We know the car is inherently quicker,” said Peugeot Sport Technical Director Olivier Jansonnie. “We’re sure that we have made up ground on our rivals. We just don't know how much as yet. But we’ll be able to tell after the first few races," he continued.
“I think that the car is ready for Imola,” Jansonnie added. “We haven’t done any testing at the track. But that was also true in Qatar and we were fast there, so I'm not too worried about that.”
References
2011 6 Hours of Imola
https://archive2.dailysportscar.com/viewArticle.cfm@articleUID=F14BD348-1143-FDC9-351CAD011E560EC9.html
Vanthoor on Imola vs Qatar
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2024/motorsports/porsche-fia-world-endurance-championship-wec-race-2-imola-italy-35881.html
Estre "hard track to pass"
https://sportscar365.com/lemans/wec/imola-thursday-notebook-3/
Jansonnie on the new 9X8
https://peugeot-sport.com/en/2024/04/16/6-heures-dimola-la-peugeot-9x8-2024-prete-pour-ses-debuts-en-course/
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