GTE in WEC Analysis
Todays 8 hours of Bahrain was the final ever race of the GTE class that has been a mainstay of the World Endurance Championship since its inception in 2012. This page will give some interesting stats of this class over this period. A more indepth analysis of all GTE entries in WEC, ELMS, and IMSA together can be found here
Wins
Interestingly, it has been rather equal in performances between the three ever present manufacturers Aston Martin, Ferrari, and Porsche with Ferrari just pipping Aston Martin for the most GTE class wins in WEC with 54 to 52. Porsche is a little further back with 44. Ferrari will go out as the only manufacturer with more pro wins than am wins with 32/22, Aston Martin goes the other way with 19/33 Pro/Am wins and Porsche with a more balanced 20/24.
As you can see from the distribution of wins below, only 2 manufacturers have ever gone a full season without a class win in the WEC. The first one is the less than successful BMW M8 GTE programme in the 2018-2019 superseason. The second one is the Aston Martin Vantage AMR GTE in its final year. Having won the GT world Championship in 2019-2020 with Nicki Thiim and Marco Sørensen and the 2022 Endurance Trophy for GTE-Am with Ben Keating and Marco Sørensen. An Aston Martin has had a win every year since 2012, except in its final year even when including ELMS.
A breakdown of all wins by manufacturer can be found in the table below.
| Manufacturer | entries | Pro | Am | Total | Podiums | AvgFinish | stdFinish |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aston Martin | 250 | 19 | 33 | 52 | 124 | 4.41 | 2.65 |
| BMW | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 6.77 | 3.23 |
| Corvette | 42 | 1 | 6 | 7 | 21 | 3.12 | 1.92 |
| Ferrari | 364 | 32 | 22 | 54 | 169 | 4.95 | 1.99 |
| Ford | 50 | 6 | 0 | 6 | 17 | 4.86 | 3.09 |
| Porsche | 373 | 20 | 24 | 44 | 154 | 4.82 | 2.42 |
Wins per Team
In addition to the total number of wins discussed in the previous section, we can look at the number of wins and podiums achieved by the teams running the cars. Interestingly, Aston Martin Racing and AF Corse are tied at the top of the list, both winning 45 races but AF Corse would win out with 125 podiums versus 102 for Aston Martin Racing. The final place on the wins podium will go to Proton Competition with 19 wins, one more than the Manthey run Porsche GT Team. Porsche GT did manage more podiums with 68 against 49 for Proton Competition. Next up is TF Sport with 7 wins and 16 podiums, followed by Ford with 6 and 17. Of the 30 teams to have entered a WEC GTE race, only 3 did finish a race on the podium and 12 did not win a race.
Want to consider the fraction of races won by a team? That get's complicated as a two car team is considered to have 2 races but only one of them can win. We can just ignore that bit and calculate the fraction of wins compared to entries, this is interesting but should be taken with a grain of salt. Except, that is, for the top three as they had at most one entry per race. Corvette, in P2 came away winning 36% of their 11 races. Only beaten out by SMP Racing, winning 38% of their 8 races. TF Sport (which does not include D'Station) come in in third, winning 29% of their 24 races and coming away with a podium in 9 additional races. Iron Lynx and the Iron Dames we the final team to win a race thus improving their average position to 4.29.
| Team | Total Entries | Wins | Win Fraction | Podiums | nunCars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 Star Motorsports | 13 | 2 | 0.15 | 6 | 2 |
| AF Corse | 238 | 45 | 0.19 | 125 | 8 |
| Aston Martin Racing | 206 | 45 | 0.22 | 103 | 6 |
| BMW Team MTEK | 14 | 0 | 0.00 | 2 | 2 |
| Cetilar Racing | 5 | 1 | 0.20 | 2 | 1 |
| Clearwater Racing | 16 | 2 | 0.13 | 9 | 1 |
| Corvette Racing | 12 | 4 | 0.33 | 8 | 2 |
| D'station Racing | 14 | 0 | 0.00 | 3 | 1 |
| Ford Chip Ganassi Team UK | 50 | 6 | 0.12 | 17 | 2 |
| GR Racing | 48 | 0 | 0.00 | 7 | 1 |
| IMSA Performance Matmut | 8 | 1 | 0.13 | 3 | 1 |
| Iron Dames | 19 | 1 | 0.05 | 5 | 2 |
| Iron Lynx | 15 | 0 | 0.00 | 2 | 2 |
| JWA-Avila | 8 | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 1 |
| KCMG | 8 | 0 | 0.00 | 5 | 1 |
| Kessel Racing | 5 | 0 | 0.00 | 2 | 1 |
| Krohn Racing | 12 | 0 | 0.00 | 5 | 1 |
| Larbre Compétition | 30 | 3 | 0.10 | 13 | 1 |
| Luxury Racing | 3 | 0 | 0.00 | 3 | 2 |
| MR Racing | 12 | 0 | 0.00 | 1 | 1 |
| ORT by TF | 6 | 0 | 0.00 | 2 | 1 |
| Porsche GT Team | 115 | 18 | 0.16 | 68 | 2 |
| Prospeed Competition | 6 | 0 | 0.00 | 1 | 1 |
| Proton Competition | 125 | 19 | 0.15 | 49 | 3 |
| Ram Racing | 3 | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 2 |
| Red River Sport | 8 | 0 | 0.00 | 0 | 1 |
| SMP Racing | 8 | 3 | 0.38 | 6 | 1 |
| Spirit of Race | 19 | 1 | 0.05 | 6 | 3 |
| Team Project 1 | 43 | 5 | 0.12 | 18 | 3 |
| TF Sport | 24 | 7 | 0.29 | 16 | 2 |
Average Finishing Position
If we discard all retirements, non-starts, and non-classifieds so we are only left with classified finishes, we can calculate the average finishing position and standard deviation for each car (defined as a unique entrant, entrant number and manufacturer). No car has an average finishing position outside of the top 10, the lowest finishing position goes to the 95 GTE-Am Aston Martin with 1.5 ± 0.5. This is also the car with the lowest standard deviation, thus making it the most consistent finisher. The lowest average finishing position of 9.3 ± 3.9 goes to the 71 Spirit of Race Ferrari which competed in 2022. The award for most consistent finisher is the 95 GTE-Am Aston Martin as mentioned earlier in this section, the least consistent finisher is the 60 Iron Lynx Porsche with 8.4 ± 4.28.
Bringing this back to manufacturers, the best average finishing manufacturer is Corvette with 2.88. This is a slightly anomalous result as there has only ever been at most one WEC Corvette in the field, this means that a good finish for one does not push the sister cars down the order which is the case for manufacturers with multiple cars. That being said, it is still evidence of great performances by the Corvette driver crews when one was entered. BMW was not helped by only having at most 2 pro cars however as they have the worst average finishing position with 6.77. The other four manufacturers all achieve an oddly similar average finishing position, won by Aston Martin with 4.45 followed by Porsche, Ford, and Ferrari with 4.84, 4.86, and 4.94 respectively. All occurrences of race results per manufacturer are given in the table below.
A breakdown of full finishing positions by manufacturer can be found in the table below.
| Manufacturer | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Ret | NC | WD | DNS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aston Martin | 52 | 38 | 34 | 22 | 30 | 25 | 22 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 32 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| BMW | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Corvette | 7 | 8 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Ferrari | 54 | 54 | 61 | 47 | 41 | 31 | 24 | 18 | 11 | 12 | 35 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| Ford | 6 | 5 | 6 | 10 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Porsche | 44 | 56 | 54 | 64 | 47 | 42 | 16 | 14 | 16 | 5 | 33 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
Podiums
It is a different story in terms of podiums though, Ferrari still wins out with a total of 169 with Porsche coming in second this time with 154 and Aston Martin quite a bit further back with 124. Additionally, every manufacturer has scored at least one podium in every year it competed in in the WEC. The lowest number of podiums achieved in one season would have been a tie between BMW in its only year and Aston Martin in 2023 with two apiece but the double podium at the final race of the year means BMW will stand alone at the bottom.
Retirements
It is very much the same when it comes to retirements all three of the ever present manufacturers getting around 30 total retirements with 32, 33, and 35 retirements for Aston Martin, Porsche, and Ferrari respectively. BMW and Ford share the record for the fewest retirements with 2 apiece. Since the different manufacturers have, of course, entered a different number of races, this shared record for fewest retirements transforms into a very different story in terms of relative retirements. Ford had the retired from the fewest number of races they entered at 4%, BMW has the highest relative retirement rate at 14%. Porsche, Ferrari, and Corvette are near identical in relative retirements with 9%, 10%, and 10%. Aston Martin comes in closer to the highest with 13%.
Car Numbers
In the initial years of the WEC, the numbers 1-50 were reserved for prototypes and 51-99 for GT cars. This rule was let go around 2020, allowing teams to run whatever number they wanted (as long as no-one else is running it of course). Of these 49 numbers, 12 were never used in the WEC. This reduces to 2 if we include any Le Mans entry (which I think we should) whether a full season or invitational car. These numbers are 80 and 87, 80 was used by Iron Lynx in the 2021 ELMS season so the only number that has never been used on a GT car in ACO competition (from what I could find) is the 87.
| number | no Different WEC Teams | Entry |
|---|---|---|
| 51 - 62 | 19 | WEC |
| 63 | 0 | Corvette (LM 2015-2022) |
| 64 | 1 | WEC |
| 65 | 0 | Scuderia Corsa (LM 2017) |
| 66 - 67 | 2 | WEC |
| 68 | 0 | Ford (LM 2016-2019) |
| 69 | 0 | Ford (LM 2016-2019) |
| 70 - 72 | 4 | WEC |
| 73 | 0 | Corvette (LM 2012-2014) |
| 74 | 0 | Riley (LM) & Corvette (LM 2012-2014) |
| 75 - 78 | 5 | WEC |
| 79 | 0 | Weathertech (LM) |
| 80 | 0 | Iron Lynx (ELMS 2021) |
| 81 - 83 | 5 | WEC |
| 84 | 0 | Weathertech (LM 2018) |
| 85 - 86 | 3 | WEC |
| 87 | 0 | None |
| 88 | 1 | WEC |
| 89 | 0 | Project 1 (LM2020) |
| 90 - 92 | 4 | WEC |
| 93 | 0 | Core Porsche (LM 2018-2019) & Proton (LM 2017 2022) |
| 94 | 0 | Core Porsche (LM 2018-2019) |
| 95 - 99 | 6 | WEC |