World Endurance Championship | WEC 2022 | Motorsport | Is It Fast

WEC Sebring 1,000 Miles – Is It Worth Going the Distance?

As you may have noticed from reading some of my other work here on Is It Fast?

I’ve been throwing myself headfirst into a multitude of motorsport this year. To check out what I think about Formula E, Extreme E, IndyCar and Formula 1, go onto my profile page and have a nice browse. Go on, you earnt it. But none of that is important right now.

That’s because I’m here to talk about the World Endurance Championship.

Image: Tim Hearn/focus-pack-media.de

In the past, I’ve dabbled in it a little. I’ve obviously paid attention to a few of the 24Hrs of Le Mans and thanks to Michael Fassbender, have followed the European Le Mans Series through Porsche’s great YouTube series.

However, when it comes to WEC, I’m not that well versed. So I thought 2022 would be the time to give it a try and once again see what all the fuss was about.

The season began last weekend at Sebring in Florida and unbeknownst to me, I was about to watch history unfold. As with IndyCar, there were a number of drivers who I knew.

This was again down to the fact that I’m a motorsports person and after a while, you just get to know people. Like IndyCar too, it helped me to invest in the race – which at 1,000 miles long was much needed if I was going to stick it out for the duration.

Mike Conway, Sebastien Buemi, Kamui Kobayashi, Sarah Bovy Michelle Gatting, Paul di Resta, Sean Galael, Robert Kubica and Tijmen van der Helm were just some of the names familiar to me up and down the field. As were Phil Hanson and Filipe Albuquerque from getting the chance to interview them ahead of the 2021 season. They were lovely chaps.

Being one of the oldest racetracks in America, Sebring looked set to be a great place to kick off the 2022 season. It’s rugged, old school and has enough twists and turns in it to keep things interesting for the full eight hours or so it was predicted that the race would last.

When the race got underway, there was some great overtaking, especially from the aforementioned Albuquerque who zoomed up the order in spectacular style on the opening lap. Things soon settled down though but remained tasty enough for me to keep my eyes on the screen.

Jose Maria Lopez has an impressive crash part way through the race but aside from a couple of other incidents, the whole event was a relatively smooth affair.

Around the mid-point, I knew I was enjoying the racing but definitely not as much as I enjoyed the likes of F1, Formula E and Extreme E. But then a curious thing happened. With about three hours to go in the race, I found myself getting more and more invested.

Image: Tim Hearn/focus-pack-media.de

It reminded me of the film, Le Mans ’66 where Ken Miles is talking about going out onto the track to get the perfect lap and finding that perfect moment where you and the car feel like one.

The Sebring 1,000 became weirdly mesmerizing in a way that all other forms of motorsport are just incapable of. While not my favourite breed of motorsport, it had endeared itself to me more than I thought it would.

Watching the racing lines the cars were taking, seeing drivers line other drivers up for an overtake in a few laps time, other classes of car further down the field getting out of the way of those higher up while still being able to get past others in their own race – it was all sublime.

I was looking forward to seeing the race through to the end.

Then the red flag came. Not because of a crash though – because of an electrical thunderstorm. Florida has a statute in place that says that in the event of an electrical Thunderstorm, everyone essentially needs to stop what they’re doing, including racing.

So just like that, the spell was broken and the race was essentially finished. The cars did go out again behind the safety car with just under an hour left to run, but we didn’t get back to green flag racing.

It was a first in WEC history to have a race end in this way and while annoying, I did find myself amused that this was what the 1,000 miles all boiled down to.

Alpine won the Hypercar category with the #92 Porsche Team winning the LMGTE Pro Category. The #23 United Autosports USA finished first in LMP2 with the #98 Northwest AMR team winning the LMGTE AM race. Finally, the #83 AF Corse won the LMP2 Pro Am category.

Image: Tim Hearn/focus-pack-media.de

All of them were well deserved wins and without having any particular allegiance to any of the teams in any of the tiers, it’s nice knowing that for the rest of the season, I’ll just be able to sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Would I recommend the World Endurance Championship to anyone who’s not watched it before? Yes – but only if you’ve got the time for it. The shortest races this year are six hours long. But on the upside, they’re at Spa and Monza so you’ll know they’ll be worth your time.

If you only feel like watching one though – make it the 24Hrs of Le Mans. After that, you’ll be hooked and want to watch all the others. It’s all part of the plan.

Author: Thiemo Albers-Daly