Mike Conway's last race for Toyota will be his 94th. The FIA WEC announced on 6 October that the 6 Hours of Monza, on 6 to 8 November, ends his full-time career, and Toyota's own tribute the next day put the record in one line: 20 WEC wins, Le Mans in 2021 and 2026, drivers' titles in 2019-20 and 2021. "In the end, I achieved everything I could ever have dreamed of," he said in the championship's release.

That sentence took a long time to become true. From 2017 to 2020 the No. 7 never won Le Mans, and twice it lost the race after leading it.

Leading Le Mans is not winning it

In 2017 the No. 7 started from pole. Toyota's report that week says the car Conway shared with Kamui Kobayashi and Stéphane Sarrazin "led for the opening 10 hours but it retired at 1.15am following a clutch problem."

Two years later the cause was smaller. On lap 367 the No. 7 had "a lead of over two minutes" when its data showed a puncture, according to Toyota's 17 June 2019 release. José María López pitted, but "a sensor issue resulted in the wrong tyre being identified," and he rejoined still on a deflating tyre. The sister No. 8 won by 16.9 seconds and took the drivers' world championship on the same afternoon.

The 2020 race, run in September, ended with the No. 7 "forced into its garage with a faulty turbo," as the Le Mans organisers recorded it. Two months later the same three drivers won the 2019-20 world title in Bahrain. Conway became a world champion before he became a Le Mans winner, which says something about how the championship and the 24 Hours measure different things: one rewards a season of finishing near the front, the other gives no credit for having led.

In 2021 the No. 7 finally won, "the first win for the #7 crew" in the organisers' words, and retained the drivers' title that November.

A driver who set his own limits

Before any of that, Conway had drawn a line in public. He won his first IndyCar race at Long Beach in April 2011, less than a year after a crash in the 2010 Indianapolis 500 in which his car was "thrown into the air and torn up by the catchfence," as Crash.net described it in 2012. IndyCar's own 2014 season review records that in 2012 "Conway removed himself from oval racetrack competition" while driving for A.J. Foyt Racing.

He kept a career afterwards. In 2014 he won Long Beach again, in his second race for Ed Carpenter Racing, and added a street win in Toronto; the WEC's release counts four IndyCar wins in all.

Endurance racing came next. His first WEC season, in LMP2 in 2013, brought "four victories from eight rounds" and third in the standings as a rookie, by the FIA's account. Toyota, he said, "welcomed me into the family in 2014," and his first top-class win came in Bahrain alongside Alexander Wurz and Sarrazin. The FIA counts 19 more after it.

Stopping ten points short

He leaves with the job unfinished in one narrow sense. When the announcement came on 6 October, the No. 7 sat "just ten points adrift of the summit of the standings with two rounds to run," the FIA said, after a late hydraulic failure at COTA. Conway's reason was the June result, won with Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries by 10.913 seconds after 381 laps, a race Paddock Notes covered at the time. "After winning Le Mans for a second time this year, it felt like the right moment to close this chapter and focus on my family," he said, and he called himself "the most successful British driver in the championship's history."

Kobayashi, Toyota's team principal as well as Conway's co-driver in the No. 7, put it in human terms: "He has been an incredible team-mate, not only in terms of speed and consistency, but on a human level as well."

Neither the FIA's release nor Toyota's names who drives the No. 7 in 2027. Before that seat is filled, Barcelona and Monza decide whether Conway's last two races close a ten-point gap, and whether the driver who once chose to stop racing on ovals also gets to stop as a champion.