From the Apex · Trackside ·
Toyota and Lewis Hamilton spent years losing. They stopped on the same weekend.
Le Mans and Barcelona, 24 hours apart, ended two of motorsport's longest droughts. One of the comebacks also acquired a Kardashian. Purely for the record.
- Toyota won Le Mans for the first time since 2022, holding off a charging BMW by 10.9 seconds.
- A day later Lewis Hamilton won in Barcelona - his first win for Ferrari, and his first in 686 days.
- Two of motorsport's longest droughts ended within 24 hours of each other.
Two of the longest losing streaks in motorsport ended within a day of each other. Only one of them has a celebrity alibi.
On the weekend of 13 and 14 June, two comebacks years in the making landed almost on top of each other. At the Circuit de la Sarthe, the number 7 Toyota of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, holding off a charging BMW by 10.9 seconds after a full day and night of racing. Toyota's sixth Le Mans win, and its first since 2022. Twenty-four hours later and a thousand kilometres south, Lewis Hamilton won the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix. His first win for Ferrari, his first in Formula 1 since Belgium in 2024, and the end of a drought that had run 686 days.
Comebacks are the best stories sport has, because underneath they are stories about waiting. Both of these men, and one very large Japanese carmaker, had spent years being told the wait might be permanent. Both proved otherwise inside 24 hours. And one of them picked up a new and extremely famous variable along the way, which the laws of the internet oblige me to mention.
Toyota's curse finally ran out of road
Toyota's relationship with Le Mans is the nearest thing endurance racing has to a tragedy you can set your watch by. In 2016 the number 5 car led with less than four minutes left, lost power on the start-finish straight and rolled to a stop while Porsche drove past to win. Grown adults wept on the pit wall. It is still one of the cruellest endings the sport has produced.
Then Toyota won five in a row, 2018 to 2022, and it is fair to say part of that run came after Audi and Porsche had gone home and there was not much left to beat. When the field thickened again, Ferrari first, then Porsche, Cadillac and BMW, Toyota stopped winning. Three years went by. This time the number 7 crew, the one that has carried Toyota's hard-luck reputation longer than anyone, settled it by 10.9 seconds with the whole grid in the fight. Earned, not inherited.
Hamilton's wait had nobody to blame
Hamilton's drought was a lonelier kind, because there was no broken gearbox to point at, only a decision he had made with his eyes open. At 40 he left Mercedes, the team he had won six of his seven titles with, to drive for Ferrari from 2025. The first season was a slog: no wins, a car that argued with him, and a steady background hum that he had made a romantic move a couple of years too late. He is 41 now, an age at which Formula 1 starts measuring you for a commentary booth.
Then Barcelona. He beat his old protégé George Russell to the flag, the much-hyped Mercedes teenager Kimi Antonelli fell out of contention, and a year of doubt evaporated over a single afternoon. It was the first non-Mercedes win of the 2026 season, which tells you how dominant his old team had been and how long everyone else, Hamilton most of all, had been kept waiting.
And now, responsibly, the Kardashian theory
The timeline, presented without comment, which is a lie, because the comment is the whole point. Hamilton's romance with Kim Kardashian went public around the Super Bowl in February. She turned up at Monaco in May, where he finished second, his sharpest result in months. She reportedly phoned the Barcelona paddock within minutes of the win. A man wins nothing for 686 days, acquires a partner whose every appearance bends the news cycle, and promptly delivers the biggest race of his Ferrari career.
Correlation, the statisticians remind us, is not causation. The statisticians have never nursed a 686-day winless streak. I am not suggesting Kim Kardashian recalibrated Lewis Hamilton's front wing. I am suggesting that if my own form picked up the month my partner started flying in for race weekends, I would not file it under coincidence in any great hurry. The axler8 recommendation engine has no view on this. It cannot. I, gloriously, can.
Two opposite tests, one lesson
Le Mans and a grand prix are near-opposite exams wearing the same overalls. Le Mans is 24 hours and roughly 5,000 kilometres, three drivers sharing one car, won as much by surviving as by going fast. Its idea of luck is a sensor that holds and rain that arrives for your rivals. A grand prix is 90 minutes, one driver, a car built like a scalpel, and its luck is sharper and crueller: a badly timed safety car, a rival's retirement, a stewards' decision. Endurance racing hides the driver inside a team and a day. Formula 1 puts him alone in front of the world with nowhere to hide.
Both droughts broke the same way, though. Not with a miracle, but with the slow, unglamorous business of getting everything right at the same moment. Toyota needed the car to last the day and the strategy to land. Hamilton needed the pace, the tyres and a rival to stumble. The breakthrough looks like fortune and is nearly always preparation that finally got its turn.
axler8's take
The tidy moral, the one that prints nicely on a poster, is that luck favours the brave, or the loved, or whatever the Kardashian wing of the analysis prefers. The duller and truer version is that neither win was a gift. Toyota spent three years losing to better-funded rivals and kept showing up. Hamilton spent a year being told he was finished and kept his head down. The romance is a wonderful subplot. The downforce did the work.
That is also the difference between a good story about a car and a good decision about one. The story is the badge, the streak, the famous face in the garage. The decision is whether the thing is quick, reliable and right for the job in front of it. I write the stories. The axler8 recommendation engine, which has no opinions and no celebrity contacts, only ever scores the second part.
Toyota waited three years. Hamilton waited 686 days. Both of them won the boring way, by being good. Do not tell Instagram.