MOTORSPORT – BMW M Team WRT won the Six Hours of Sao Paulo at Interlagos in Brazil, held as the fourth round of the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC).
BMW’s number 15 crew of Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello, and Dries Vanthoor triumphed following a tense three-way battle with Ferrari and Cadillac for Hypercar honours.
Cadillac Hertz Team Jota had earlier locked out the front row on the grid following a hotly contested Hyperpole session, but Magnussen swiftly split the leading pair of V-Series.R challengers.
He first powered BMW’s M Hybrid V8 Hypercar past Cadillac’s Earl Bamber, driving BMW’s number 38 contender, and then hunted down Will Stevens in the number 12 Cadillac ahead.
The M Hybrid V8 then assumed a net lead that it would eventually hold on to, thanks to feisty performances from Magnussen and Marciello, and a composed final couple of stints by Vanthoor.
In the closing stages of the six-hour race, Vanthoor was under threat from both the number 51 499P Hypercar of Ferrari AF Corse and the recovering number 12 Cadillac.
But he held his nerve to take the chequered flag with 242 laps completed, crossing the finish line 2.254 seconds in front of Ferrari’s defending world champion James Calado, with Stevens not far behind in third 6.687s back.
“This has been a long time coming,” Magnussen, a former pole-sitter at Interlagos during his Formula One career, was quoted as saying by fiawec.com. “I’m just so happy to finally get the victory.
“I think we had the quickest car today, and it was an absolute pleasure to drive. Everything was on-point, from the strategy to the pit-stops and my two team-mates did an amazing job.”
Calado and teammates Antonio Giovinazzi and Alessandro Pier Guidi equalled their best result so far this season for the defending world champions, while Cadillac ended a 12-month podium drought at the scene of their breakthrough FIA WEC victory last year.
Meanwhile, the LMGT3 category was won by the number 34 Racing Team Turkey by TF crew of Peter Dempsey, Salih Yoluc, and Charlie Eastwood in their Corvette Z06 LMGT3.R.
Team WRT’s number 69 trio of Anthony McIntosh, Parker Thompson, and Daniel Harper were second in class behind the wheel of their BMW M4 LMGT3 Evo, while The Bend Manthey’s number 92 crew of Yasser Shahin, Riccardo Pera, and Richard Lietz came third in their Porsche 911 GT3 R LMGT3.
The 2026 season of the FIA WEC continues with round five in Austin, Texas in the US on September 6.
The sixth round will then be held in Fuji on September 27, followed by the seventh and penultimate meeting in Doha, Qatar on October 24.
The WEC will then bring the curtain down on this campaign with the Bapco Energies Eight Hours of Bahrain, scheduled for November 6 and 7 at Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir.
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