Circuits · 3 min read · 542 words

What is the history of the 6 Hours of Spa?

The 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps has been on the WEC calendar in every season from 2012 to 2026, and WEC Engine's archive holds 15 WEC races at Spa. Toyota has won 8 of them, Audi 4, Porsche 1, Ferrari 1 and BMW 1. It is the traditional last round before Le Mans. BMW M Team WRT won in 2026 for BMW's first overall WEC win.

The pre-Le Mans round

From 2012 to 2026, Spa was the last race before the 24 Hours of Le Mans in every season except 2021, when Portimão and Monza were held in between.

The Spa result has been a mixed guide to Le Mans. In 8 of the 15 years from 2012 to 2026, the manufacturer that won at Spa went on to win Le Mans the same year: Audi in 2012 and 2013, Toyota from 2018 to 2022, and Ferrari in 2025. In the other seven years, a different manufacturer won at Le Mans.

The winners, season by season

Audi Sport Team Joest won four of the first five Spa races, in 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016, with versions of the Audi R18. The exception was 2014, when the No. 8 Toyota TS040 Hybrid of Anthony Davidson, Sébastien Buemi and Nicolas Lapierre won.

Toyota then won seven Spa races in a row. The TS050 Hybrid won in 2017, May 2018, May 2019 and August 2020, the last of them postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The GR010 Hybrid won the first three Hypercar-era Spa races, in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

The 2024 race went to the No. 12 Hertz Team JOTA Porsche 963 of Callum Ilott and Will Stevens, a customer-run car. It was Porsche's second Hypercar win, after Qatar earlier that season. In 2025 the No. 51 Ferrari 499P of Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi won and set the race's fastest lap, with the sister No. 50 on pole.

The 2026 race was the first overall WEC win for the BMW M Hybrid V8. The No. 20 of Robin Frijns, René Rast and Sheldon van der Linde finished 1.969 seconds ahead of the sister No. 15 for a BMW one-two.

The race distance

The race runs for six hours on the 7.0 km Spa-Francorchamps circuit. The winner's distance has varied with the conditions: from 2012 to 2026 the winning car covered between 103 laps, in 2022, and 176 laps, in 2015.

What the race tells us

Spa has been on every WEC calendar from 2012 to 2026 and has produced 5 different winning manufacturers. Toyota has the most Spa wins, 8, but the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions went to Porsche, Ferrari and BMW.

Last updated · 6 hours of spa · spa-francorchamps · le mans warm-up · toyota · audi

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Related questions

Circuits

Which circuit has hosted the most WEC events?

Spa-Francorchamps has hosted the most WEC races in WEC Engine's archive, with 15. Le Mans has 14 races in the archive, which leaves out the 2016 24 Hours, a WEC round that has not been ingested. Counting that race, Le Mans has hosted one more WEC race than the archive shows. Bahrain has 14, including two races in 2021, and Fuji 13. Spa and Le Mans are the only circuits that hosted a WEC race in every season from 2012 to 2026.

Drivers

Who has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the Hypercar era?

Two manufacturers have won the 24 Hours of Le Mans since the Hypercar class arrived in 2021. Toyota won in 2021, 2022 and 2026, and Ferrari won three in a row from 2023 to 2025 with the 499P. Through the 2026 race, Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi are the only drivers to have won it twice in the Hypercar era.

Manufacturers

What was the Toyota TS050 Hybrid era like?

The Toyota TS050 Hybrid raced in the WEC's LMP1 class from 2016 to 2020. It won 19 WEC races, including three consecutive 24 Hours of Le Mans (2018, 2019 and 2020), and its crews won the drivers' world titles in 2018-19 and 2019-20. It is also the car of one of Le Mans' best-known late losses: in 2016 the leading TS050 stopped in the final minutes and Porsche won.