A look back at the 2017 World Endurance Championship

It has been called the end of an era: 2017 will signal the end of the traditional, calendar-driven World Endurance Championship. In future we will need to refer to the Champions as the “2018-2019 winners”, just as we do in football, I suppose. And if the stars align, then there is no reason to suppose that in a few years’ time we will not think anything special of it.

Theoretically, football has a clear ‘season’, in which Premiership matches start in August, and run through to May, but fans will not find it difficult to find matches in the remaining two months of the year. The idea of a year-round season is not unfamiliar to followers of football, as well as other sports.

I just feel that the WEC is losing something, somehow. At the very least, the gains are completely cosmetic and rather artificial. It all smacks a little of moving deck-chairs. What is unclear (to me) is whether we are aboard a sinking ship.

There are two elements to the matter. First, as I have mentioned before, is the move to a championship that ends with the Le Mans 24-hour race. We’ve had 85 Grands Prix d’Endurance, none of which have been the final round of any championship – why the need to make it so now? Second, why do we have to get there via the so-called ‘super-season’ that will incorporate two 24-hour races at Le Mans? I am all for innovation, but I wonder if a couple of non-championship races might have served the purpose better? Or what about a revival of the ‘Coupe Biennale’ concept to score points at Le Mans?

In 1962, the South African GP (for formula one cars) was held in December (29th), and was the final round of the championship for 1962; whereas in 1965 and 1968, it was held in January (on New Year’s Day, to be precise, with practice and qualifying in the previous year) and counted towards the World Drivers’ Championships for 1965 and 1968, respectively. The next championship race of the 1968 season was in Spain on 12th May, meaning that there was more than five months separating the first and second rounds of the season. Considering the final round was on 3rd November in Mexico, 1968 was indeed a long season.

In this context, it all seems rather arbitrary, especially considering that the “super-season” will consist of eight rounds, compared to this season’s nine… inevitably, one is tempted to suspect some other motivation is at work. I fail to see how, in this case, less is more.

But enough of the politics. I have always tended to focus more on individual performances in specific races, rather than on championships. So I am sure that once we get underway with racing in the WEC again next year at Spa-Francorchamps, my enthusiasm will be boiling. In any case, change will surely be a good thing – one of my carps of recent seasons has been the homogeneity of it all.

And I digress. The intention of this post was to look back on the 2017 season, with some numbers which may not have been published elsewhere. In the spirit of change, I thought that a look at the number of racing kilometres covered by the leading cars during the season might be interesting.

Car No.	Car	Distance
1	Porsche 919 Hybrid	12,429.6kms
2	Porsche 919 Hybrid	13,092.9kms
7	Toyota TS050 - Hybrid	9,981.4kms
8	Toyota TS050 - Hybrid	13,020.5kms

In terms of race distance completed by each driver in LMP1, the results (at least the top ten) were:

Car No.	Car	Driver	Distance	%age
8	Toyota	Sébastien Buemi	5,197.2kms	39.9%
2	Porsche	Brendon Hartley	4,762.8kms	36.4%
2	Porsche	Timo Bernhard	4,616.8kms	35.3%
1	Porsche	Nick Tandy	4,480.6kms	36.0%
8	Toyota	Kazuki Nakajima	4,351.9kms	33.4%
1	Porsche	Neel Jani	4,188.4kms	33.7%
7	Toyota	Mike Conway	4,026.1kms	40.3%
1	Porsche	André Lotterer	3,760.6kms	30.3%
2	Porsche	Earl Bamber	3,713.3kms	28.4%
8	Toyota	Anthony Davidson	3,311.6kms	25.4%

The final column (%age), is simply the distance that the named driver raced, as a percentage of the total distance completed by that driver’s car. This is interesting, as it shows how each manufacturer may have favoured certain drivers over others, or it shows who had the luck of the draw, or maybe it is an indication of how pushy some drivers are!

Since most of the GTE-Pro teams consisted of two-driver teams, there are some slightly more impressive figures if you look at that class, although this does put into perspective the distance driven by Buemi - and the performance differential between LMP1 and GTE, if you consider the time spent at the wheel.

Here, then, are the top ten drivers, in terms of race distance completed during the season:

Driver	Car	Distance	Time
Frédéric Makowiecki	Porsche 911 RSR	5,759.7kms	33h 36m
Alessandro Pier Guidi	Ferrari 488 GTE	5,431.7kms	31h 49m
Davide Rigon	Ferrari 488 GTE	5,242.9kms	31h 19m
Sébastien Buemi	Toyota TS050-Hybrid	5,197.2kms	26h 40m
James Calado	Ferrari 488 GTE	5,189.6kms	30h 59m
Sam Bird	Ferrari 488 GTE	5,076.3kms	29h 07m
Nikki Thiim	Aston Martin Vantage	4,999.7kms	29h 39m
Andy Priaulx	Ford GT	4,996.9kms	30h 02m
Olivier Pla	Ford GT	4,880.4kms	28h 55m
Marco Sørensen	Aston Martin Vantage	4,862.2kms	29h 08m

Some readers might be tempted (as I was) to divide the distance driven by the time spent at the wheel, in order to calculate average speed, and to get some kind of performance ranking. I shirked away from this calculation, on the grounds that, although the time spent driving excludes time spent in the pits (as well as time spent during the red flag periods in Japan), it does not take into account safety car periods, full course yellows or Slow Zones.

Don’t forget that none of these numbers take account of time spent driving the car in practice or qualifying - this is purely the distance actually raced. It is sobering (at this time of year) to consider that Sébastien Buemi spent just over three working days racing at nearly 200km/h for the distance (by road) from Paris to Dakar!