Henri Dubois · Endurance-Korrespondent
A hydraulic failure in the closing stages decided victory and defeat in Austin, while away from the front two starkly different stories of rise and fall played out across the field.
Ferrari AF Corse claimed victory in the Lone Star Le Mans, the fifth round of the FIA World Endurance Championship, on Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin. The Ferrari 499P with Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina and Nicklas Nielsen took the lead after the previously dominant Toyota TR010 Hybrid driven by Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries suffered a hydraulic failure and consequent loss of power steering roughly ten to eleven minutes from the finish, forcing de Vries to bring the car off the track. In the LMGT3 class, Aston Martin customer team Heart of Racing prevailed with Ian James, Zacharie Robichon and Mattia Drudi, while the weekend wrote its own stories of form, consistency and setbacks across nearly every corner of the grid.
Aston Martin and Ferrari set the pace in qualifying
The free practice sessions hinted at how close the top would be in Austin. Following a Ferrari-dominated first session where Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi set the pace, Aston Martin THOR Team with Harry Tincknell and Tom Gamble took control in both the second and third practice sessions, clocking 1:52.174 minutes in the final one. That kind of consistency across two sessions was far from guaranteed in the hypercar field this weekend, as the race itself would later confirm.
In hyperpole, however, Ferrari reclaimed pole position when Pier Guidi, Calado and Giovinazzi posted 1:52.445 minutes, just edging the Cadillac of Earl Bamber, Sébastien Bourdais and Jack Aitken at exactly the same lap time. Notably, the Ferrari crew that would go on to win the race, Fuoco, Molina and Nielsen, managed only 1:52.873 minutes in that session, running visibly off the pace of their sister car, a detail that would lose significance over the course of a six-hour endurance grind.
Six hours of attrition end in Toyota's heartbreak
With conditions oscillating between drying and still-damp asphalt, the start brought chaos to the field before order settled over the following hours. The real story of the race was written by the number 7 Toyota: through bold pit strategy and strong stints from Conway, Kobayashi and de Vries, the crew climbed through the field and, after a late safety car restart, had built a comfortable lead in the closing phase. Yet roughly ten to eleven minutes from the finish, the car lost hydraulic pressure, killing the power steering and forcing de Vries to nurse the Toyota off the circuit. It was a failure that robbed Toyota of what may well have been the most convincing win of the race and handed Ferrari, running second at that moment with Fuoco, Molina and Nielsen, an unexpected path to victory.
Just as striking as the win itself was the contrast within the Ferrari garage. While the Fuoco, Molina and Nielsen car climbed from midfield on the hyperpole grid to the top step, their pole-starting sister car with Pier Guidi, Calado and Giovinazzi limped home eleventh, more than forty seconds adrift and earning barely half a point for the drivers' standings. It was the weekend's most dramatic reversal and proof of how little a pole position actually guarantees over six hours. Cadillac Hertz Team Jota rounded out the podium with Bamber, Bourdais and Aitken just over four seconds behind the winner, an unusually tight margin for a six-hour race.
Alpine Endurance Team steered both cars into the top five, with Ferdinand Habsburg, Charles Milesi and António Félix da Costa finishing third and Victor Martins, Jules Gounon and Frédéric Makowiecki securing fifth. Since the 2026 regulation overhaul, only the combined tally of both manufacturer entries counts toward the constructors' championship, with no separate team title in the hypercar class. Aston Martin THOR Team confirmed the pace shown all weekend with Tincknell and Gamble fourth, while BMW M Team WRT and Peugeot TotalEnergies each split their entries: Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor finished eighth, while Robin Frijns, René Rast and Sheldon van der Linde landed only twelfth. At Peugeot, Loïc Duval, Malthe Jakobsen and Théo Pourchaire claimed tenth, while Nick Cassidy, Stoffel Vandoorne and Paul di Resta came in sixteenth, two laps down, leaving six positions between the two Peugeots.
Heart of Racing dominates a deeply stratified LMGT3 class
In LMGT3, Heart of Racing claimed the top of the hyperpole grid with Gray Newell, Eduardo Barrichello and Jonny Adam setting the class pace at 2:05.160 minutes, marginally ahead of their teammates Ian James, Zacharie Robichon and Mattia Drudi. Over six hours, however, the internal pecking order reversed: it was the James, Robichon and Drudi crew who crossed the line as class winners, while their pole-starting counterparts Newell, Barrichello and Adam had to settle for third, yet still an exceptionally strong weekend for the team as a whole.
Manthey DK Engineering backed up the form it had built all weekend with Ayhancan Güven, Timur Boguslavskiy and James Cottingham and worked its way to second. Vista AF Corse took fourth through François Hériau, Simon Mann and Alessio Rovera ahead of the Proton Competition trio of Sebastian Priaulx, Ben Tuck and Eric Powell in fifth.
Iron Lynx split its two cars across sixth and seventh, Garage 59 came home with Alexander West, Finn Gehrsitz and Benjamin Goethe in eighth, while the team's second crew finished fourteen laps further back. Further down, Team WRT, TF Sport, Akkodis ASP, Racing Team Turkey by TF and The Bend Manthey filled out the field, with the second Akkodis ASP car of Tom Van Rompuy, Hadrien David and Esteban Masson not classified after accumulating forty-five laps of deficit.
What Austin means for the championship
When you tally the combined manufacturer points from Austin, the picture grows more nuanced than the outright win suggests. Ferrari tallies 25.5 points through victory and eleventh place, Alpine reaches 25 through third and fifth and sits effectively locked in this weekend, while Cadillac contributes 20 points via second and ninth place. Toyota, despite the number 7 car's commanding pace until its failure, counts only the points from its sixth-place sister car of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryō Hirakawa, eight points total, a return that hardly reflects the genuine pace the manufacturer showed on this Sunday.
For Toyota, the failure coming so late in the race with victory already within reach will weigh heavily and likely dominate the weeks until the next round. For Heart of Racing, meanwhile, its one-two finish at the top of the LMGT3 class, regardless of which of its own cars finished first, should underline its standing as the class standard-bearer, while the midfield in both classes already hints at the next chapters waiting in races to come.
