The Test of Time
THE RAKE buckles up for a hot lap at the World Endurance Championship, a different kind of racing where the skill, fearlessness and resilience of drivers like Jenson Button are pushed to the limit.
In a world in which motorsport often plays out in bursts of speed measured in nanoseconds, the F.I.A. World Endurance Championship (W.E.C.), a marathon among sprints, has emerged as a test of engineering, elegance and endurance that elevates racing from spectacle to symphony.
While Formula One dazzles with precision and glamour, and Nascar roars with working-class grit, W.E.C., established in 2012, offers something altogether more rarefied: a global stage where man, machine, and time itself are the true adversaries, with races stretching from six hours to 24. And they do so on iconic tracks, from Le Mans and Spa to Imola — each a setting where legend and lore interweave to create dynasties that petrolheads will wax lyrical about for decades to come.
“The thing that’s amazing for me with W.E.C. is that it’s so many different cars,” says Jenson Button, the 2009 F1 world champion who is racing in his second year for the Cadillac Hertz Team Jota. “In our category you’ve got Ferrari, Peugeot, Toyota, Cadillac, Porsche — I mean, it’s just a plethora of manufacturers, and you don’t get that in any other kind of motorsport.”
The Englishman and Rolex testimonee since 2022 is right: in Formula One there are just three engine manufacturers, “and that’s it”, he adds. But in W.E.C. you also have Alpine, BMW M, Aston Martin and Lamborghini to boot. “It’s great to see such different cars but also very different types of engines: you’ve got four-cylinder engines, six-cylinder engines, V8s, normally aspirated V8s like ours. They all sound different, they all perform in a different way, and it makes the racing really interesting.”
Indeed it does. Button — who pilots an outrageously fast taupe-coloured car that makes a unique bellow, an all-American throaty growl that is recognisable from two corners away — has, like all other teams, another two drivers with whom to share the workload, which is heavy, not least because they have to take on competitors in their own class but drivers racing alongside them in a different category. That’s because W.E.C. isn’t one race but a pair of races entwined in one. So when the quiet whirl of the hypercars blitzing into their growly engines gives way as they peel out of the pit lane, they join the LMGT3 category of racing, based on road-going production models where marques such as Corvette, Ford, Lexus, McLaren and Mercedes AMG rev it up and put their best cars through their paces.
Button says: “I think multi-class racing is always more interesting to watch, because we’re racing our cars in our category but we also have to fight past the [slower] GT cars, which isn’t easy on such a small track like this, which is effectively like a go-cart track for us.”
Button was speaking at (and about) Imola, one of the most dangerous tracks on Earth — a narrow, fast and unforgiving circuit that, unusually, is situated in the heart of its eponymous municipality and wends its way through thickets of forest and around mundane structures such as homes, farms, playgrounds, padel courts and restaurants. As the broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson once put it, “at some point in history, every corner here has claimed the ego of a big name”.
Ayrton Senna crashed and died at Imola in May, 1994. During a hot lap with Davide Rigon, one of the Ferrari LMGT3 drivers, one deduces not only the challenge of Imola but also the fearlessness of the drivers who take it on, not least in a crowded double-race. There are semi-blind corners and apexes with adverse camber, humps and hollows that buffet the car, and a curved pit lane that you lap at more than 200mph, all of which you must tackle with great precision and aplomb, regardless of how good you think you are. “What I loved in Formula One,” Button says, “was the simplicity of the vehicles and how easy they are to drive compared to hypercars. In endurance racing, the cars are much more technical to drive — there is more to consider and manage with these vehicles, all while driving under more enduring conditions.
You’re working much harder than you would in a Formula One car. In single-seater racing you can simply hit the brakes, feel the G-force, and maybe deal with a touch of oversteer or understeer. But these cars, they are really difficult to drive: there is less downforce, a lot more weight, they slide around a lot more, through the corner you do a lot more work than you do in a Formula One car.”
As a result, Button says, the drivers are having to constantly make on-the-go adjustments to keep the recalcitrant hypercars in control: “You go into a turn and you break, you have a bevy of oversteer, then understeer and then more oversteer, and then you hit the curb and you’re bouncing off the curbs, so it’s much more technical in terms of driving.”
With all the variables, no wonder it took Jenson, by his own admission, “three races to get my head around everything”. The same can be said about those watching the sport, which now boasts eight events across Europe, Asia, North America, South America and the Middle East.
Unlike F1, there is an intimacy to W.E.C. events, according to the championship’s Chief Executive, Frédéric Lequien. “We want the fans to get up-close with the event, the cars, the teams, the drivers, and to see everything in a more intimate way,” he says. “You see that here at Imola, where the fans have turned out in record numbers.”
Indeed, with Rolex as the official timekeepers and everyone from Mark Webber and Mr. Le Mans himself, Tom Kristensen, accessible, even the most passive motorsports fan can get torqued up and wrapped up by the soaring, speeding symphony that is the World Endurance Championship, much as I did.
