Lift and coast

Lift and coast is the fuel-saving technique of releasing the throttle well before the braking point and letting the car coast, then braking normally. Each corner done this way saves energy for a small lap-time penalty, and summed over a stint it can buy an extra lap of range or protect a marginal strategy.

In the WEC's Hypercar era the practice is baked into the format, because stint energy is capped: drivers manage to an energy target per stint, and how efficiently a driver converts allocation into lap time is a genuine skill separator. When you see a front-runner suddenly lapping half a second slower with no traffic in sight, energy management is the usual explanation.