Preview: Toyota and BMW Chase Elusive First COTA Win as WEC Title Fight Continues

Text & Images: Rick Kiewiet

FIA WEC returns from its summer break this weekend for Lone Star Le Mans, with Circuit of The Americas hosting round five of a season that has both major championships hanging by a thread. The Hypercar Drivers' standings are tied at the top, and just five points cover Toyota and BMW in the Manufacturers' fight — a gap Austin could easily flip in either direction.

Toyota and BMW still chasing a first COTA win

Both marques have won twice already in 2026, but neither has ever triumphed at this circuit. Toyota's drought there is one of only four tracks the manufacturer has never conquered in WEC, though Brendon Hartley won three straight COTA races with Porsche between 2015 and 2017, and Sébastien Buemi and Mike Conway remain the only drivers to have started every WEC race held there. BMW arrives with its own reasons for confidence: Sheldon van der Linde set the fastest time of the entire 2025 race weekend in FP2, and his #20 crew of René Rast and Robin Frijns currently leads the Drivers' table.

The picture looks rather different to how it did before São Paulo. BMW M Team WRT took its second win of the season at Interlagos, with Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor holding off a late Ferrari charge from Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado. Toyota's round went the other way entirely — a damp-track shunt for Conway before the start was followed by penalties and a lap deficit for the #7 car, while the #8 of Buemi, Hartley and Ryō Hirakawa lost around twelve minutes in the pits after contact damaged a toe rod. Conway's crew arrived in Brazil leading the championship and left without it.

Cadillac, Peugeot and Ferrari all have points to prove

Cadillac heads to Austin off the back of its first podium in a year at São Paulo, courtesy of the JOTA-run V-Series.R, and will fancy its chances further on home soil. Norman Nato and Earl Bamber both have prior COTA wins to their name — Bamber's coming en route to the 2017 title — and Ricky Taylor joins the effort this weekend to strengthen the lineup further. Peugeot, meanwhile, will remember COTA fondly: Loïc Duval, Stoffel Vandoorne and Mikkel Jakobsen shared the marque's first podium finish in Texas last year, with Duval still holding the outright lap record he set back in 2016.

Ferrari's task is more pointed. The Scuderia has locked out the front row in each of the last two COTA races and will want a repeat if it's to close the gap in the title fight, particularly given the 499P's podium strike rate at the track sits at 50 per cent — the best of any Hypercar in the field. Qualifying form tends to matter more here than elsewhere: no COTA winner has ever started lower than fourth on the grid.

Corvette chases a first US win, Aston Martin looks to end its drought

In LMGT3, Corvette arrives on a two-race winning streak after victories at Le Mans and São Paulo, but the brand has never actually won on home soil, and its solitary COTA podium dates back to 2016. Local driver Ben Keating, from just outside Houston, will make his 45th WEC start this weekend, the most by any American in series history.

McLaren defends its maiden COTA win from last year, secured after a post-race penalty demoted the #54 AF Corse Ferrari that crossed the line first — the same car that had denied Porsche's late 2025 charge before contact with Ben Barker's Ford proved costly. Aston Martin, by contrast, is enduring an unfamiliar barren run despite boasting ten COTA class wins, twice as many as any rival, including the marque's sole LMGT3 win from pole two years ago. Back-to-back poles at Le Mans and Interlagos this year suggest the drought won't last much longer. Ford's Proton Mustangs, so dominant in Hyperpole a year ago, have yet to repeat that front-row pace since — a pattern that will need addressing if the American muscle cars are to feature at the sharp end again.

A circuit that doesn't forgive

COTA's mix of elevation change, high-speed sweeps and technical sections — capped by the uphill Turn 1 climb known as 'Big Red' and the triple-apex complex at Turns 16-18 — makes for one of the more physically demanding stops on the calendar, hard on tyres and brakes alike. It's also proven to be a car-breaker: eight retirements in 2024, seven in 2025. Both figures stand in contrast to São Paulo, where every one of the 35 entries took the chequered flag.

Session Times (Local, GMT-5)

Free practice begins Friday 4 September. Qualifying and Hyperpole follow at 15:00 on Saturday 5 September, with the six-hour race getting underway at 13:00 on Sunday 6 September.