As ever in the FIA World Endurance Championship, it all comes down to the finale in Bahrain.
Toyota have won the manufacturers' and drivers' world championships for the past five seasons (2023, 2022, 2021, 2019-20, 2018-19), but they're on the back foot in 2024.
Porsche lead both the drivers' and manufacturers' championships and could complete a sweep of both WEC and IMSA in terms of drivers, teams and manufacturers titles. The German Penske-run squad has already won the IMSA titles, wrapping them up at Petit Le Mans earlier this month, although they didn't win the race overall.
Phil Oakley
So, how will the WEC titles fare in comparison? The Racing Line has crunched the numbers (see caveats* below - these aren't predictions or anything of the sort) and found, unsurprisingly, Porsche are indeed in the driving seat.
Drivers' championship: almost a foregone conclusion
Going into Bahrain, the #6 Porsche of Andre Lotterer, Kevin Estre, and Laurens Vanthoor are on 150 points. 35 points behind them are this year's Le Mans winners, Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina, and Nicklas Nielsen of the #50 Ferrari.
Two points behind the Ferrari trio are the #7 Toyota drivers, Nyck de Vries and Kamui Kobayashi. Mike Conway, their teammate, is not among them as he missed Le Mans; he sits fourth on 77 points and out of the running for the championship.
Bahrain is an 8 hour race, so the winner scores 38 points. In addition, WEC awards a point for pole. So there are 39 points available. This essentially means, in order to win the championship, the #50 Ferrari needs to win with the #6 Porsche finishing lower than 10th.
Ferrari's Fuoco, Molina, and Nielsen while victorious at La Sarthe, while the #6 Porsche crew have won two races overall this year. Images: Charly Lopez / DPPI (left), Julien Delfosse / DPPI (right)
And #7 Toyota needs to win and the Porsche crew not to score points at all, in order to take the championship.
To be clear, 10th would be the #6's worst result of the year, by far. Their current worst is sixth in last month's Lone Star Le Mans at Circuit of the Americas.
In the scatterplot graph below, we've tried to apply some statistical analysis* to this. We've given the algorithm the previous race results for each car, then simulated a randomised result 100 times to find out how likely each car is to win. (This is called a Monte Carlo simulation, for anyone interested.)
In the simulation, the #6 Porsche won the championship (not necessarily the race) 97 out of 100 times. The #50 Ferrari won three times. The #7 Toyota duo didn't win at all.
We also ran the simulation 1000 times, just to see if anything changed. We don't have a graph for this — it was unreadable — but Porsche won 978 times and Ferrari won 22 times. And once again, the #7 Toyota didn't win at all.
The maximum points Fuoco, Molina and Nielsen can end up with are 154, for taking pole and winning the race. This happened twice in the 100 simulations, with the other simulation winning the race but not getting pole.
Now, as I've caveated below, this doesn't really mean anything. And proper statistics folk would doubtless have tons of issues with how I've done this. But it does represent the relatively tiny chance Molina, Fuoco and Nielsen have of taking the championship, and the even smaller chance Kobayashi and de Vries have.
Manufacturers' championship: A battle to the end
Switching to the manufacturers' championship, things look a bit closer.
Porsche have 161 points. Toyota have 151. Ferrari have 134.
The major difference for the WEC manufacturers championship, compared to other series: only the top-placing car for each factory team scores points, and the customer cars from JOTA, AF Corse, and Proton are cut out of the equation.
The 'big three' WEC manufacturers will duke it out at Bahrain for the manufacturers' world title. Images: Charly Lopez / DPPI, Julien Delfosse / DPPI, Joao Felipe / DPPII
This means Porsche and Toyota have three wins apiece contributing to this championship (Porsche won in Qatar, Belgium (Porsche's factory #6 car finished second, to race winner #12 JOTA, a customer car), and Japan, Toyota won in Italy, Brazil, and the USA (finishing second in the race overall to the satellite 'customer' #83 Ferrari)).
Ferrari have a single win, albeit the biggest of the year where they earned double points: Le Mans.
We ran our simulations again* to find what could happen in the championship. Again, we simulated the result 100 times — shown on the scatterplot graph below.
Out of the 100 simulations, Porsche won 72 times. Toyota won 25 times. And Ferrari won three times.
So, that essentially means, according to the statistical analysis, Porsche have well over two thirds chance of winning the championship, although not quite up to 75% chance. Toyota have exactly a 1/4 chance of retaining their crown, and Ferrari once again have 3% chance of winning.
Interestingly, running the simulation 1000 (again, unreadable on a graph) times did result in Porsche's chances decreasing slightly — winning 689 of the simulations. Toyota won 278, and Ferrari 33.
*Some caveats
Remember these are just simulations. The algorithm was given some past results and told to simulate a number of future results based on this year's races, with some randomness thrown into the mix as well. It's not all comprehensive or even particularly complex, and there are doubtless lots of issues with the way I've done it.
It's not a prediction, or a machine learning calculation, or anything like that. Just simulations to work out possible — but by no means conclusive — chances of winning for each competitor in each championship.
Who do you think will win? Will it be as tight as expected? Or will Porsche sweep to victory?
Download The Racing Line, your personalised motorsport calendar, on iOS today to get up to date session times and customisable notifications for over 100 different series, including single seaters, sportscars, rally, bikes, and much more.