Gary Watkins: Our sports car racing expert has been writing for MS since 1996. He’s the only print journalist to have covered all 101 WEC races

After a Le Mans 24 Hours victory in each of its first two campaigns with the 499P Le Mans Hypercar, Ferrari had an avowed aim for 2025: to win a maiden World Endurance Championship title with the car. Target number one was the manufacturers’ crown. Come the end of the season, it achieved that goal — and also won the other big prizes on offer. The Prancing Horse collected the drivers’ trophy with James Calado, Antonio Giovinazzi and Alessandro Pier Guidi and made it three in a row at Le Mans, though with a difference.

The difference was that victory at the centrepiece round of the WEC went not to one of the blood red factory 499Ps run by AF Corse, but to the yellow car entered on a satellite basis by the Italian team. That meant the winning entry shared by Robert Kubica, Phil Hanson and Yifei Ye wasn’t eligible for those much-coveted manufacturers’ points. Yet as the WEC circus departed Europe after Le Mans for the second leg of the championship, Ferrari looked well set to achieve its objectives.

“With half the championship done, the 499P was unbeaten”

Ferrari made a flying start to its 2025 Hypercar class campaign. With half the championship done, the 499P was unbeaten, the factory cars dominating the first three races. And on another day one or more of the two might have beaten the yellow car at Le Mans, not withstanding Kubica’s superlative performance. The 499P was in the ascendant from the get-go.

It was dominant at the Losail International Circuit in the first race in February, maintained the upper hand through its home race at Imola in April and still had an edge at Spa-Francorchamps in May. A win for Nicklas Nielsen, Antonio Fuoco and Miguel Molina first time out was followed by two for team-mates Calado, Giovinazzi and Pier Guidi.

The diminishing advantage was explained by the Balance of Performance and how it was calculated in 2025. Cynics suggested that it also explained how Ferrari stole the advantage in the first place.

Ferrari argued that it had made significant strides with the 499P over the second half of 2024 and on through the short off-season that followed. There had been a solo upgrade under the evo joker rules that define the scope of development allowed for both LMH and LMDh machinery in Hypercar, but more importantly, it claimed, was a no-stone-unturned approach to getting the most out of its existing package. That meant extracting the maximum away from the scene of its two big victories, the Circuit de la Sarthe at Le Mans. It knew it would be crucial in its bid for some end-of-season silverware.

It was searching for “a better understanding of our car to exploit the aero, the tyres, the potential”, explains Ferrari sports car technical director Ferdinando Cannizzo. “Last year we segmented all the tracks to understand how best to set up the car,” he says. “We put in our pocket different options for the car to be fast on different circuits. This is what gave us the possibility to be very strong at the start of the season over four tracks with completely different characteristics.”

The counter argument is that Ferrari played the system. The hypothesis goes that it knew what was coming in terms of the BoP and ‘adjusted’ its performance at the back end of 2024 accordingly. The BoP was calculated on the previous three WEC races, which meant the Austin, Fuji and Bahrain events counted when it came to working out the BoP for Qatar. The conspiracy theory, however, isn’t borne out by the facts. The best of the 499Ps was the fourth-fastest car last time out in ’24 in Bahrain, then the two cars third and fourth at Austin, though admittedly they were nowhere in the race in between at Fuji.

“Toyota notched up a 1-2 at Bahrain, where it has always excelled with a bit of help from the BoP”

The BoP system was modified through the season. Three races became two out of three, but Ferrari’s early season successes still worked against it as the series began its post-Le Mans leg at Interlagos in July. Any advantage, achieved by whatever means, had been mitigated, just as it was gearing up for two tracks – Interlagos and Fuji – at which the 499P had never been at its best.

Ferrari’s promise that the 499P would be a stronger all-round package was backed up by its performance at those two tracks, particularly at the latter. The results, however, didn’t follow. Fuji was a race at which Ferrari looked as though it might lose its grasp on the titles. It left Japan with just one manufacturers’ point, and its drivers with none, courtesy of no fewer than five penalties for on-track misdemeanours racked up across its two cars.

Ferrari scored just 32 manufacturers’ points in the three races after Le Mans, championship leaders Calado, Giovinazzi and Pier Guidi only 10 in the drivers’ classification. The poor run coincided with an upturn in form at Porsche and, in particular, the 963 LMDh shared over the full season by reigning champions Kévin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor. They were joined for long races by Matt Campbell for a campaign that got off to a faltering start.

Estre and Vanthoor collected six points from the first three races, then finished second to the yellow Ferrari at Le Mans, just 14sec down at the end of 24 hours. Yet they didn’t pretend they were genuine contenders: they made it look close courtesy of a faultless run interrupted only by one slow puncture in a race where Ferrari made mistakes. Nor did they think the championship was a realistic target. “We were like, OK, this is not going to happen because obviously Ferrari was strong and winning all the races,” reckoned Vanthoor.

A fourth at Interlagos, followed by a wet-weather win in Austin and then a third from the back of the Hypercar grid in Fuji gave them more than an outside chance of the title heading for the season finale in Bahrain. Porsche, too, could steal the makes’ crown courtesy of some consistent scoring from the Porsche Penske Motorsport factory team’s second car. The German manufacturer was keen to point out that a repeat of the Fuji results in the heat of the desert would yield both crowns.

The reality was that the odds were stacked against it, more so when the BoP for Bahrain came out. The 963 went to the grid as the heaviest of the Hypercar pack. Toyota notched up a 1-2 result at a track where it has always excelled with a bit of help from the BoP, while Ferrari had a car that might have been able to challenge the Japanese had it not opted to play the percentages in pursuit of glory. So in control of its destiny was it that it could afford to swap the positions of its two factory cars in the closing stages of the race to ensure a 1-2-3 finish in the points. Third for Nielsen, Fuoco and Molina gave them third in the standings behind Calado and co and the entry shared by Kubica, Hanson and Ye.

It was more than enough to yield the manufacturers’ crown, a first for the marque at world championship level with a prototype since 1972 when it claimed the old World Sportscar Championship at a canter with the 312 PB. It was mission accomplished for Ferrari in 2025.

WEC 2025 Hypercar

Top 20 of the world drivers’ championship