Toyota turned in its strongest showing of the 2012 World Endurance Championship season, defeating Audi soundly in the Six Hours of Shanghai.
The #7 Toyota TS 030 Hybrid of Alex Wurz and Nicolas Lapierre gained a lap lead by halfway through the race and stayed ahead for the final three hours.
Toyota drove a perfect race. The drivers were clean through traffic, the pit crew was quick, and the mechanics gave the drivers what Nicolas Lapierre called “probably the best set-up we ever had.”
The two Audi R18 e-tron quatros, the #1 of André Lotterer, Marcel Fässler, and Benoît Tréluyer, and the #2 of Allan McNish and Tom Kristensen, stayed out of trouble in traffic (save a slight contact between Fässler and the #21 Strakka HPD) and ran without mechanical faults, but simply weren’t fast enough.
The Audis lost an average of eight-tenths of a second per lap. The German cars were more efficient, but the Japanese machine was able to more than make up for the extras fuel stop it needed.
