The 6 Hours of Bahrain has been a staple of the FIA World Endurance Championship calendar since its inception in 2012, and has twice played host to the final round of the season. So what can we learn from a look back through the history books?
All three manufacturers have previous success in the Middle East, but Toyota and Stéphane Sarrazin are the only ones to have tasted the victory champagne on more than one occasion. After André Lotterer, Benoît Tréluyer and Marcel Fässler became the inaugural winners for Audi in 2012, Sarrazin came out on top in 2013 with Anthony Davidson and Sébastien Buemi, before switching across to the No. 8 car in 2014 and doing it again with Mike Conway and Alex Wurz.
Last year’s race saw Neel Jani, Romain Dumas and Marc Lieb take a stylish victory for Porsche, which in turn helped their team-mates Bernhard, Hartley and Webber to clinch the World Championship title. The Le Mans-winning trio will be hoping for a repeat this weekend as they seek to wrap up the title for themselves, and will have one eye on extending Porsche’s run of pole positions to three in a row to prevent the potentially crucial additional point from going to one of their rivals.
Allan McNish ended his professional career sadly with a DNF in Bahrain 2013, while Wurz marked his swansong with third place in 2015. This weekend, it’s Mark Webber’s turn to bring the curtain down on his driving career, and the Australian would dearly love to go out on a high, back at the circuit where he and his team mates were crowned champions last year.
After back-to-back wins in Shanghai and Fuji, LMP2’s form-team G-Drive Racing and lead driver Roman Rusinov will be especially looking forward to visiting Bahrain. It was in the Sakhir desert that Rusinov secured the 2015 title alongside Julien Canal and Sam Bird with a victory, the Russian’s second at Bahrain after he also prevailed in 2013 with John Martin and Mike Conway. Rusinov can still take second in the points from the RGR Sport crew led by Ricardo Gonzalez, who finished third last year with Pipo Derani and Gustavo Yacaman.
Patrick Pilet and Fred Makowiecki were last year’s LMGTE Pro race winners for Porsche, but both competed elsewhere for the marque in 2016; just the single Dempsey-Proton-entered 911 RSR has raced this year for outgoing champion Richard Lietz and Michael Christensen. The car is due to be replaced by a new model in 2017, so will they give it a fitting send-off? On each of the other three occasions, the class was won by a Ferrari 458 Italia with Toni Vilander at the wheel. Can the new F488 GTE continue the lineage of its predecessor and help Sam Bird and Davide Rigon overturn their 12 point deficit to Nicki Thiim and Marco Sorensen?
Bahrain has, however, been kind to Aston Martin Racing in the past, especially in the LMGTE Am class. Victory for Christoffer Nygaard, Kristian Poulsen and Thiim – his first in the WEC – in 2013 helped settle the title in favour of their team-mates Jamie Campbell-Walter and Stuart Hall, while Thiim won again in 2014 with Poulsen and David Heinemeier-Hansson. Paul Dalla Lana, Pedro Lamy and Mathias Lauda made it a hat trick for AMR last year.
Such is the advantage enjoyed by AF Corse’s Emmanuel Collard, Rui Aguas and François Perrodo that winning the title may be a tall order for the Aston trio, however a sixth victory of the season remains a distinct possibility.
James Newbold
