Insight: Inside Team WRT's Sporting Braintrust

A look into Team WRT's three sporting directors and the key roles they play in helping keep the Belgian squad at the front of the pack...

There can be no denying that the pinnacle of endurance racing is getting more competitive than ever. Seven cars finished on the lead lap of this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, while just 13 seconds separated the top-four in the recent FIA World Endurance Championship round in Brazil — in a contest that did not feature a single safety car to bunch up the pack. When the racing is so close, every single detail counts and that is why the role of the sporting director has become even more important.

Team WRT certainly knows a thing or two about winning — and is riding the crest of a wave in the WEC currently — having long been lauded for its strategy masterclasses. But another key component in its success is the experience of its sporting directors.

Pierre Dieudonne and Thierry Tassin have each triumphed in the 24 Hours of Spa as drivers and are team stalwarts, while they have been more recently joined by Rahel Frey, a class winner at Spa. In fact, there is a bit of a theme here. WRT team principal Vincent Vosse has also conquered the Belgian endurance classic, as has the squad’s GT program manager Kurt Mollekens.

“Vincent tends to recruit racing drivers for a simple reason: we know how it is out there because we’ve done it,” explains Dieudonne, who first visited Spa back in 1955 and won the 24 Hours in a Mazda RX-7 alongside Tom Walkinshaw in 1981. “When you have an engineer coming from school and he’s working on his computer, all he’s interested is here we can earn one tenth of a second, but they lose the big perspective.

“Sometimes it is better to lose two seconds a lap or three seconds a lap and avoid either a penalty or making a mistake, but usually the engineers only see the performance. So it’s very important in a team to have people who keep that helicopter view to steer the boat in the right direction.

“Not many teams employ as many racing drivers as WRT and that’s the reason: it is very important to know what’s happening when you are alone in the car in the dark or in the pouring rain or in the heat. Many people, especially the engineers, are excellent in their field but it’s very important that they keep the perspective that inside the car you have a human being with its weaknesses but also with its strengths.”

So what exactly is the role of the sporting director? First and foremost they need to have an in-depth understanding of the regulations. And that is no easy task.

Initially there’s the FIA’s International Sporting Code that underpins all of the elite competitions — and that runs to 86 pages plus 15 appendices. Then there are the supplementary regulations that are specific to each event. For example, that document numbered 192 pages at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, while at the subsequent CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa it stood at 163 plus appendices.

“And then, on top of that, we have the race director’s briefing notes and the stewards’ bulletins so you keep having a flow of instructions, which sometimes come a few hours before the race,” continues Dieudonne. “First of all, you have to digest that and then make sure you have the time to pass it to your team and make sure nobody makes a mistake.”