Simon Mann has shed light on the AF Corse Ferrari team’s dramatic defeat for LMGT3 honors in Sunday’s FIA World Endurance Championship race at Fuji, as a slow final lap for Alessio Rovera handed victory to Corvette and TF Sport.

The No. 21 AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3 shared by Mann, Rovera and Francois Heriau appeared on course for victory heading into the closing stages of what turned out to be a fuel-saving contest after the third and final safety car period of the race.

That was even the case after the No. 21 crew was handed a five-second penalty for a pit stop infringement, specifically for having a mechanic remaining in the working area while the car left its pit box at its penultimate pit stop in Hour 4.

However, a limping Rovera saw a seven-second lead over Charlie Eastwood’s No. 81 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R heading into the final lap cut to just two at the checkered flag, which meant Eastwood and his co-drivers Rui Andrade and Tom van Rompuy ended up taking the class victory by a margin of some three seconds.

Explaining Rovera’s slow last lap, Mann told Sportscar365: “I believe there was a miscalculation with the energy [at the final pit stop], so we had to do a massive lift-and-coast to be able to make it to the end.”
Second place still means that Mann, Rovera and Heriau have closed to within 11 points of championship-leading Manthey Porsche trio Riccardo Pera, Richard Lietz and Ryan Hardwick ahead of November’s finale in Bahrain.

“In the end the pace was not so bad, we just struggled to overtake and follow,” said Mann.
“During my stint, I didn’t think we were in contention, but the team did a great job with the strategy, which put us in contention.
“It’s a shame not to close out the win, because those extra points would have helped the championship.
But Bahrain is a long race with no points, so we’ll keep pushing and try to score as many points as we can there.”

Rovera and Eastwood were among a group of cars to commit to an early final full service pit stop and later make an additional splash of fuel at the end of the race, which turned out to be the winning strategy, putting them ahead of Lietz’s Manthey Porsche 911 GT3 R the leading car on the alternative strategy.

Reflecting on his pursuit of Rovera at the end of the race, Eastwood admitted he didn’t realize until the “very last lap” that there was a possibility of jumping ahead of the Ferrari to score TF Sport’s second win of the season.
“I was probably getting a bit annoying over the radio because I was asking all the time, ‘
What is going on?’,” joked Eastwood. “For a long time, I didn’t really have a clue, and half the grid was on a different strategy.

“We knew we could go the longest on fuel, but it was still going to be nip and tuck, and it depended so much on how the battles were going behind. I knew there was a small gap to Lietz once we came out of the pits.
“But we had perfect pace at the end of the stint, and the final pit stop was perfect:
I think we ended up with eight or ten megajoules [of energy] in the car at the end, which is half a second on the actual refuel time.

“On the second to last lap, they mentioned the gap was 7.2 seconds, but that [Rovera] had a five-second penalty, and I thought I may as well keep pushing, and we saw that the Ferrari maybe didn’t have enough fuel.”

Eastwood was involved in late contact with the Team WRT BMW of Augusto Farfus at Turn 13, which briefly put the No. 81 crew’s win into doubt until the stewards determined that no further action would be taken.

Explaining the incident, which was not caught by TV cameras, Eastwood recalled: “Essentially, I got around the outside of the No. 31 [BMW] at Turn 13, and he just drove me off the track for the fourth time. That’s fine, we beat them in the end!”