A closer look at Alonso's win at Spa

A victory for Toyota's star signing last weekend brought the WEC to the attention of a whole new audience, garnering column inches in places where the series is largely ignored. The win for Alonso offered an easy headline above the stories that barely hinted at the role of his team-mates, Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima, not to mention the complexities of a slighty strange race. 

Alsono, Buemi and Nakajima dominated the event at Spa. They were in control for all but 15 or so minutes of the six-hour event. They had it easy, quite frankly, on a day that the drivers of the sister Toyota had one hand tied behind their backs and the new wave of LMP1 privateers to enter the WEC didn't offer anything in the way of resistance.

The winning Toyota started the race in Belgium with a one-lap advantage over the Toyota TS050 HYBRID shared by Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez. And when things did finally start to get interesting between the two Japanese cars, the race result was frozen by the team's top brass sitting on the pit wall. 

The head-start given to Alonso and his team-mates over their only credible rival was the result of an administrative error concerning the Conway/Kobayashi/Lopez car's fuel flow meter by the Toyota Gazoo Racing team. Conway and Kobayashi had beaten Alonso and Nakajima to pole position — they have an aggregate qualifying system in the WEC, remember — during a messy session twice interrupted by the red flag, only to lose their time and receive a one-lap penalty. Conway had to start the race from the pitlane after everyone else, GTE cars included, had completed their first racing lap.

He and his team-mates were back on the lead lap before half distance courtesy of a series of safety cars. One final yellow-flag period with an hour to go, more or less wiped out the remaining advantage for the lead car. Alonso was 55 seconds or so ahead of Conway when the course vehicle took to the track and about five seconds to the good when it pulled off with 49 minutes to go.

Finally, we had a race. Conway, who had been chipping in to Alonso's advantage before the safety car, was able to reduce it to almost nothing before the final round of pitstops with just under 25 minutes to go. This was the point at which Toyota drew a line under the race.

It was no surprise to anyone in the team. And it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone watching, and not because the driver at the front was the one who was going to give Toyota the most coverage.

Team orders are a part of long-distance sportscar racing, just as they are a part of most other forms of motorsport, especially those involving manufacturers. And the instruction to the Toyota drivers, made plain and clear to them long before the race, was that there would be no racing beyond the final stops.

It was nothing new. Porsche came in for heavy criticism during last year's WEC over its use of team orders to win a championship it effectively had wrapped up after the Le Mans 24 Hours, but Toyota was actually the first to play that game in 2017. Kobayashi had been told to hold station behind Buemi at the end of the Spa race, then round two of the championship, 12 months ago. 

Manufacturers can't allow their drivers to go racing door-to-door all the way to the chequered flag. They have to protect their investment. 

Conway, Kobayashi and Lopez knew the rules. They've been the victim of them before, and probably will be again. The shame for them was that they were the faster of the two Toyota trios at Spa.

That might surprise some people who are not au fait with the WEC. Sorry to anyone who thought that Alonso, one of the greatest F1 drivers of all time, would pitch up in the series and blow away team-mates with years of sportscar racing experience, but that was never going to be the case. Alonso, for one, has always made that clear, stressing that he's the newcomer with a lot to learn. 

Conway and co were probably always going to be quicker than their team-mates in the race because they were the ones playing catch-up. They had to push, whereas Alonso, Buemi and Nakajima were able to take a more conservative approach that showed on the stopwatch. 

Conway, who keeps getting better and better as a sportscar driver, was quickest on the averages from Kobayashi, with Alonso in third place. Yet it's difficult to read too much into these statistics now that each car is limited to just four and a half sets of tyres for qualifying and the race. It is impossible to know the condition of tyres the driver has under him during each of his stints. 

Alonso admitted that the "safe approach" he and his team-mates were able to take probably wasn't the quickest, but endurance racing is about winning races with the least possible risk. So for the Spaniard, Spa was mission accomplished as he wrapped up his first victory aboard a racing car since the 2013 Spanish Grand Prix almost exactly five years ago.  

Standing on the top step of the podium once again, he reckoned, was a good feeling. 

"I was saying to the guys: this is so nice to feel the podium," he said. "Pick me up tomorrow morning, I will try to sleep here!”

Photography courtesy of LAT Images