Henri Dubois · Endurance Correspondent
The World Endurance Championship comes to Barcelona for the first time, and Toyota could decide the drivers' and manufacturers' championships in just the penultimate race.
From October 16 to 18, the FIA World Endurance Championship enters new territory. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Montmeló will host a WEC race for the first time, with the 6 Hours of Barcelona starting on Sunday at 12:00 p.m. local time. It's the penultimate race of the season, and it begins with a clear situation: Toyota leads both the drivers' and manufacturers' standings and can secure both titles in Catalonia, according to FIA WEC calculations.
A replacement race on familiar yet new ground
Barcelona wasn't on the original calendar. In late July, the WEC confirmed that the Qatar 1812 km and the 8 Hours of Bahrain would not take place this year due to the situation in the Middle East. Barcelona and the season finale in Monza on November 8 took their place. Both replacement races last six hours and award the standard points scale with 25 for a win, not the elevated points that were set for longer formats.
The circuit is no stranger to endurance racing. The European Le Mans Series races regularly on the 4.657-kilometer track with 14 turns, and ahead of the 2019/20 season, Montmeló served as the venue for the WEC's testing session, the so-called Prologue. However, there has never been a World Championship race here, and the Hypercars are competing in Barcelona for the first time. Nobody has reliable comparison data from a race. Only Genesis knows the circuit from three test days in late 2025. For the engineers, this means that the two practice sessions on Friday carry more weight than at a circuit where tire degradation is known from previous years.
Toyota with two match points
In the drivers' standings, the trio in the number 8 car, Ryō Hirakawa, Brendon Hartley, and Sébastien Buemi, lead their teammates in the number 7 Toyota by ten points. After Barcelona, only 26 points remain to be awarded. In the manufacturers' standings, Toyota's lead over BMW is 23 points, extended by Toyota’s victory at Fuji in September, which hardly anyone expected before the race.
For Buemi, this weekend is special in any case: he's competing in his 100th WEC race, the first driver to reach that milestone. He led the standings ahead of the final two races in 2014, in the 2018/19 season, and 2023, and he became World Champion each time. A fifth title would be more than any driver has ever won in this championship.
BMW still has both cars, numbers 15 and 20, in contention for the drivers' title, but must make up ground. René Rast and Robin Frijns, long-time championship leaders, have scored just four points from the last three races. Reigning World Champion Ferrari also needs a strong result in Barcelona if the decision is to wait until the home race in Monza. The fact that five different manufacturers have started from pole in the last five races shows how tightly bunched the field is, and on a circuit with no prior history, this unpredictability is unlikely to diminish.
Saturday, class by class
On Friday, both classes run together, with the first practice session starting at 11:30 a.m. and the second at 4:30 p.m. On Saturday, the schedule separates the classes. LMGT3 opens at 8:50 a.m. with its third practice session, qualifying follows at 11:50 a.m., and the Hyperpole at 12:10 p.m., where the ten fastest cars determine their starting positions at the front. After that, the Hypercars take over: third practice at 12:40 p.m., qualifying at 3:40 p.m., Hyperpole at 4:00 p.m. Each class gets exactly one qualifying session and one Hyperpole, giving the Hypercar teams three hours between their final practice and qualifying to analyze data from a surface none of them has raced on.
LMGT3: Corvette chases its first title
A decision could also come in the GT class in Barcelona. TF Sport, running Corvettes, has the teams’ title in its sights, and the competition must deliver now to keep the finale open. Best positioned is the number 27 Aston Martin Vantage from Heart of Racing, the only car in the class on the podium in the last two races, with victory in Austin and second place in Fuji. Behind lurk the two Porsches from Manthey and the BMWs run by WRT. The number 21 Ferrari 296 from Vista AF Corse is still in contention, but Ferrari has been without a win in LMGT3 for eleven races, the longest drought for the brand in any GT class in this championship.
Six hours on a circuit that none of these cars know from a race can't be won in qualifying. What will matter is which driver trio manages its stints best on unfamiliar tire degradation and which pit crew hits its strategy windows. For Toyota, that could be enough to celebrate two titles on Sunday evening. For everyone else, it's about delaying the decision until Monza.
