Valkyrie Heads to Barcelona Chasing a First WEC Podium — and the Vantage a Title
The road-derived Hypercar has scored in every round this year but hasn’t stood on the podium. Barcelona is new to everyone, and the #27 Vantage is 24 points off the LMGT3 lead.
Aston Martin's Valkyrie has scored points in every WEC race it has entered this season, and on Sunday it takes that streak to a track nobody in the Hypercar field has raced in the series: the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, which hosts Round 7 of 8 as a late replacement for the cancelled Middle East rounds.
The run is eight races long and includes two fourth-place finishes, at Spa and at Austin, but no podium. At Fuji three weeks ago the #007 car of Tom Gamble and Harry Tincknell led outright in the fourth hour before a pit-entry penalty and a late Safety Car reshuffled the order, and the team heads to Spain looking to turn the race Toyota won on a fuel-only gamble into a result that sticks.
What's at stake in the standings
The arithmetic is tough. Aston Martin sits sixth in the Hypercar Manufacturers' championship on 54 points, 42 behind the tie for fourth between Alpine and Cadillac, both on 96. Only 88 points are available from Barcelona and the November 8 season finale at Monza, so fourth place would need two near-perfect weekends from both Valkyries plus a collapse ahead.
Realistically, the target is a first podium for the only road-derived car in the class. The Valkyrie races a modified version of the production car's 6.5-liter V12 that spins to 11,000 rpm and makes more than 1,000 hp in street form, throttled back to the 500 kW (671 hp) cap written into the Hypercar and IMSA GTP rulebooks. Aston Martin says it's the only road-based hypercar competing in both the WEC and IMSA this year.
Barcelona should suit it. Adam Carter, Aston Martin's head of endurance motorsport, points to a fast first sector followed by a slow final sector, a profile he says the car has already handled well elsewhere. Tincknell adds that the circuit's last two corners have gone back to the original high-speed layout, which plays to the Valkyrie's strengths, though he admits the team has neither raced nor tested there. Marco Sørensen is more cautious: the track is narrow, and managing traffic through the GT3 field will be hard for every Hypercar crew.
There's a home-race subplot, too. Alex Riberas, who shares the #009 with Sørensen, grew up in Barcelona and is racing a world championship round on his home circuit for the first time. "Never in a million years did I think this would become a reality," he said in the team's release.
The Vantage has a real title shot
The more realistic championship conversation is in LMGT3. The Heart of Racing's #27 Vantage, driven by team principal Ian James, Mattia Drudi, and Zach Robichon, won at COTA and finished second at Fuji, behind the Team WRT BMW that stole the show from 14th on the grid. That leaves the crew second in the Teams' standings on 62 points, 24 behind TF Sport's #33 Corvette with 52 still on the table.
The sister #23 of Gray Newell, Jonny Adam, and Dudu Barrichello is 37 points off the lead and mathematically alive, but the team's stated goal for that car is a first WEC win for Newell and Barrichello. The Vantage has taken the last three LMGT3 pole positions where qualifying ran, at Le Mans, São Paulo, and COTA.
It caps a strong few weeks for Aston Martin's customer racing arm, which also took a GTD Pro class win at Petit Le Mans with a team in only its sixth IMSA start.
The 6 Hours of Barcelona runs Sunday, October 18. Monza follows on November 8, after which the series moves to its nine-round 2027 calendar, with Qatar and Bahrain expected to return.
