Porsche has won the World Endurance Championship constructors’ title. Winning the Shanghai WEC race gave the team 308 points, putting Porsche beyond reach of Audi (238 points) and Toyota (137 points) with one WEC round remaining.

The win is Porsche’s 13th World Championship title as a constructor in endurance racing, and the first since 1986. Between 1964 and 1986 Porsche took twelve constructors’ titles in the Sports Car World Championship. Here’s Porsche’s race summary.

Porsche at WEC Shanghai

The seventh of eight rounds of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) was held as a six-hour race at the Formula One circuit of Shanghai. The winning drivers who shared the Porsche prototype were Timo Bernhard (Germany), Brendon Hartley (New Zealand) and former Formula One driver Mark Webber from Australia. The sister Porsche 919 Hybrid of Romain Dumas (France), Neel Jani (Switzerland) and Marc Lieb (Germany) crossed the finish line just behind them and made it the fourth one-two victory this season for Le Mans record winners Porsche.

Porsche 919 LMP1 Hybrid wins WEC title

This year’s double victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 14 and the world championship title came a lot earlier than expected. Porsche only returned to top-level motorsports in 2014, when it was the only German car manufacturer and the only sports car manufacturer worldwide who had three premium plug-in-hybrid cars on the market (918 Spyder, Cayenne, Panamera). Porsche was attracted by the WEC’s revolutionary efficiency regulations, which requires high performance hybrid technology from the manufacturers’ prototypes and strictly limits their energy consumption. Within a very short period of time, an entirely new infrastructure at Porsche’s R&D centre in Weissach was set up and a team of 230 experts employed.

I haven’t followed all of this year’s WEC as been up to my eyes in building a garage and trying to keep the builders paid, but this is a great win for Porsche and the manufacturer has exciting plans for 2016. I have been following those stories: we’ll talk about them soon.