BMW now has the “pace to fight for wins” in the World Endurance Championship with its M Hybrid V8 LMDh, WRT team boss Vincent Vosse believes.
Vosse made the statement after the #15 WRT BMW shared by Marco Wittmann, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor took M Hybrid’s first WEC Hypercar class podium with second place behind Porsche in last Sunday’s Fuji 6 Hours.
“We had the pace to fight the Porsche and fight for the win but P2 is still good, we’ll take that,” Vosse told Autosport.
“We proved that we are now in the mix, that we can compete.”
BMW’s Fuji performance, which also encompassed the M Hybrid’s best WEC qualifying performance with third position for Vanthoor, came after a step forward was made last time out at Austin earlier this month.
The best of the BMWs at the Circuit of The Americas, the #20 car shared by Rene Rast, Robin Frijns and Sheldon van der Linde, was on course for fifth before a penultimate-hour drive-through penalty and then sixth before the car stopped a lap too late at its final pit call and was penalised again for going over its energy allocation for the stint.
Vosse revealed that WRT and BMW were unsure whether they could follow up on that at Fuji, a track on which the M Hybrid had never previously raced or tested.
“There was clearly a change of track characteristic, but we showed here with our best results in qualifying and the race that we are continuing to make progress,” explained Vosse.
“We are improving every little thing, the team, the car and the drivers’ understanding of the car, and the Balance of Performance has also helped us.
“We were not the quickest today, but we were up there and we did our job.”
Vosse suggested that BMW could have won the race at Fuji but for a broken left rear rim when Marciello was involved in an incident with Cadillac driver Earl Bamber in hour three.
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Because Marciello had to pit early to hand over to Vanthoor it removed the strategic advantage the car had gained by stopping under the first Virtual Safety Car that led into a full safety car.
Asked if BMW is going to the 2024 WEC finale in Bahrain to win the race, Vosse was non-committal.
“At least we are going to Bahrain with confidence that we are going to be somewhere up there,” he said.
“To say we are going to win would be difficult because Hypercar is so competitive now.
“Step after step we are getting there, but to win everything needs to be perfect and today for us it wasn’t because we had the broken rim.”
