That title lead? Gone, and in the most brutal way possible. According to Motorsport.com, the #20 BMW M Team WRT crew of Robin Frijns, Rene Rast, and Sheldon van der Linde arrived at the Fuji round of the World Endurance Championship sitting pretty at the top of the standings. They left it empty-handed and down to third after a disasterclass in bad luck and chaotic contact.
Everything started going sideways before a single wheel turned in anger. Heavy rain forced the cancellation of qualifying, setting the grid by the fastest times from practice—a session where the BMW M Hybrid V8 had not even completed a low-fuel push lap. That left Rast staring up at the field from 17th and last on the grid.
It's shit, we can't change it. There's two more races to go, there's 50 points on the table. And we are 24 behind and Toyota is a team that is always competitive wherever we go.
What followed next was pure, unfiltered racing grit, quickly undone by chaos. Rast put on a clinic in the opening stint, carving his way straight into the top 10 before an ill-timed VSC dropped him back to 12th. Then the real trouble started at the restart. ASP Lexus driver Clemens Schmid pitched Rast into a spin at Turn 11. Trying to claw his way back through the pack, Rast collided with the #51 Ferrari 499P of James Calado, destroying the rear wing and puncturing a tyre on the BMW.
As if one Ferrari encounter wasn't enough, van der Linde later found himself sandwiched between Calado's team-mate Alessandro Pier Guidi and a Porsche GT car. Cue another puncture, sealing the car's fate outside the points in 13th place. The stewards ultimately penalised Schmid and Pier Guidi for their contacts, while the clash between Calado and Rast was written off as a racing incident due to a McLaren LMGT3 car being in the mix.
BMW motorsport boss Andreas Roos cut straight to the point about the carnage, noting that the #20 car was simply innocent cargo in other people's incidents. “For the 20, unfortunately, I’m very sorry because they were involved in an accident two times,” Roos told the media. “It was not their fault but one time we had to repair it and two times we had a puncture. In the end they had no chance.”
The math now looks punishing. With Fuji marking their second consecutive non-score, Frijns and Rast sit 24 points behind the race-winning #8 Toyota crew of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley, and Ryo Hirakawa, while the #7 Toyota of Nyck de Vries, Kamui Kobayashi, and Mike Conway has jumped four points ahead in second. Frijns didn't sugarcoat the deficit, telling reporters: “It's shit, we can't change it. There's two more races to go, there's 50 points on the table. And we are 24 behind and Toyota is a team that is always competitive wherever we go.”
At least the manufacturer had a silver lining in the garage. While the #20 machine suffered, the sister #15 BMW crewed by Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello, and Dries Vanthoor salvaged a podium by finishing third, proving the pace was in the machinery if only the luck had followed.
