Toyota Clinches Both WEC Hypercar Titles at Monza — Then Calls the Finale 'a Bit Sad'
Toyota completed a World Endurance Championship title double at the 6 Hours of Monza on November 8 — the No. 8 TR010 HYBRID crew of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryō Hirakawa took the drivers' championship and Toyota's manufacturers' crown was already sealed — yet neither Toyota finished in the top nine, Cadillac won the race, and Toyota's technical director David Floury called the finale "a bit sad" in comments reported on November 10. It was a championship won across a season, not on the day, and the team was honest about the difference.
Cadillac's Day, Not Toyota's
The finale belonged to the No. 38 Cadillac V-Series.R of Jack Aitken, Sébastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber, which won its first race of the season by 5.607 seconds over the No. 36 Alpine, completing 191 laps. Aitken led from the opening lap, then handed over after a two-hour stint and left for the airport to get home for the birth of his first child. The win was Bourdais' first in more than a decade, in his final race for the JOTA-run Cadillac effort, and Bamber's first in more than nine years. Alpine's second place was its third podium of the year in its final WEC race. The Aston Martin that crossed the line third did not keep the place: post-race penalties for a tyre-pressure infringement and exceeding the maximum energy per stint dropped the No. 007 car to 12th in the final classification.
Champions, a Lap Down
Toyota's race was the strange part. Both TR010 HYBRIDs spent the day outside the top 10 on pace, qualified 14th and 17th, and finished a lap down in a race interrupted by four safety-car periods and three full-course yellows. In the official final classification the No. 8 finished 10th and the No. 7 — Kamui Kobayashi, Nyck de Vries and Mike Conway — 11th, both on 190 laps. That single point for 10th place settled the drivers' title at 115 points for the No. 8 crew against 97 for the No. 7 crew, an 18-point margin, while the manufacturers' table closed at 215 points for Toyota against 172 for BMW, in front of a reported 75,181 spectators at Monza.
Why "a Bit Sad" Is the Honest Quote
Floury's point, reported on the morning of November 10, was that Toyota knew before race week it would not be in contention at Monza — and hinted at Balance of Performance as a factor, in a championship whose rules bar teams from publicly discussing BoP. The showdown had also been defused in advance: Toyota's 1-2 finish at Barcelona in October had already eliminated every rival from the drivers' fight and sealed the manufacturers' title, leaving only an intra-team contest with limited points available in a standard-length finale. None of that erases the season behind it. Toyota won four of the eight rounds in the TR010 HYBRID's first season, including Le Mans and its home race at Fuji, and took seven podiums. The title is the No. 8 crew's third together, a fifth world championship for Buemi and Hartley and a third for Hirakawa. Monza also closed a career: it was Conway's final race before retirement, ending 12 seasons with the team that brought two titles and 20 wins since 2014.
The Takeaway
Championships are supposed to be season-long arguments, and Toyota's 2026 is the proof in both directions: dominant enough across eight rounds to make the finale academic, and ordinary enough at Monza to say so out loud. The WEC's Hypercar era keeps producing that tension — a title decided by consistency, and a last race that belonged to somebody else.