Le Mans' 'worst piece of driving': Toyota's bitter defeat to BMW

For the wider world memories of the French ’99 enduro are probably focused on flying Mercedes: the new CLR LM-GTP prototype flipped no fewer than three times through qualifying, the morning warm-up and then the race before the German manufacturer parked its remaining car. Sports car aficionados, however, will recall a classic confrontation between BMW and Toyota. It was a battle fought between the two brands twice over.

The first Toyota v BMW confrontation lasted into the early hours of Sunday morning and was a duel between the Toyota GT-One shared by Allan McNish, Thierry Boutsen and Ralf Kelleners and the BMW V12 LMR driven by the Schnitzer-run factory team’s lead line-up of Tom Kristensen, JJ Lehto and Jorg Muller. Neither would make the finish, and when the Bimmer retired in the 21st hour the race suddenly became a straight fight between the remaining entries from the two manufacturers. The BMW shared by Pierluigi Martini, Yannick Dalmas and Jo Winkelhock ultimately prevailed in a climatic and controversial finish to the race.

It was the latest — and not the last — near-miss for Toyota in its quest to win Le Mans, which wasn’t finally fulfilled until 2018. The GT-One was a goal-post moving design initially developed to the GT1 rulebook, which made it a road car in theory rather than spirit.

It hah already lost a clear-cut chance to win Le Mans on debut in 1998. The car shared by Boutsen, Kelleners and Geoff Lees had come within 80 minutes of victory. The car had already needed two changes of its gearbox internals, but still had a narrow advantage over the chasing Porsche 911 GT1-98s as the race drew to a close when the transmission problems struck again. There was no oil left in the ‘box this time, the resulting temperatures leaving no scope for another repair. It may or may not be true that the sump plug had not been correctly replaced at the previous stop for a replacement of its gear cluster.

Toyota came back in 1999 with a heavily revised version of the GT-One developed at the Cologne Toyota Motorsport GmbH facility. The aero of a car now racing in the new LM-GTP class — no one was pretending these were road cars anymore — was dramatically revised and there was a now a paddle-shift system devised to try to mitigate the gearbox issues.

The improvement was dramatic. Martin Brundle, the team’s star signing for 1998, went six seconds faster to improve on his second place on the grid in year one of the programme to take the only pole of his sports car career. A bid for a second Le Mans win with team-mates Vincenzo Sospiri and Eric Helary was derailed in hour five with hydraulic problems that cost the car nine laps.

That turned Le Mans ’99 into a two-horse race between the Boutsen/McNish/Kelleners Toyota and the Kristensen/Lehto/Muller BMW. It was a game of tag that stretched through into the small hours. The Japanese car was faster on track, but its German rival was quicker in the pits and going a lap further on the fuel between visits.

“I remember getting Thierry getting into the lead and buggering off at one point, but we were slow in the pits,” recalls McNish. “The team hadn’t competed since Le Mans the year before, remember, but the guys got faster and faster through the race.”

It was a bit more complicated than that. Overheating injectors meant there as a delay in restarting the car’s twin-turbo V8 engine almost every time. And then there was Schnitzer’s prowess under the all-seeing eyes of famed team manager Charly Lamm. The Bavarian operation was one of the all-time great endurance teams, though admittedly in the touring car arena.

The battle came to a dramatic end early on Sunday morning. Boutsen was leading when he was punted into the wall for the Dunlop Chicane by a GT car. The Belgian sustained serious back injuries and would announce his retirement, already scheduled for the end of year, from his hospital bed in the immediate aftermath of the race.

McNish has no doubts that it would have been a Toyota win had the two cars been able to battle it through to the end of the 24 Hours: “We would have won in a straight fight. But I’m sure that Tom would say the same about BMW. We’ve argued about that one plenty of times.”

Kristensen and his team-mate looked home and dry as the race entered its final stages. Its lead went up to four full laps – none of the Dane’s nine wins at the Circuit de la Sarthe would be won by such a wide margin.

The win went west, however, for reasons even more bizarre than Toyota’s failure the year before. The top of a front damper worked loose on the leading V12 LMR, setting off a chain reaction that put Lehto in the wall in the Porsche Curves. The car dropped down on its suspension and the front anti-rollbar fell into the mechanism of the accelerator pedal, jamming it open.

Kristensen described it as the “biggest disappointment” of his Le Mans career.

“We lost a certain win,” he says. “After that I never accepted people saying we were going to win before the chequered flag. If people started congratulating me before the end of the race, I’d tell them to shut up. Anything can happen. Le Mans choses its winners.”

For Kristensen, he chose the ‘wrong’ BMW, the slower one, in 1999. Dalmas, the unofficial crew leader on the car as a three-time Le Mans winner already, persuaded his team-mates to adopt a conservative strategy.

“I say we must not push, we must be careful on the kerbs, careful, careful,” he says today. “Pierluigi would ask, ‘can we start pushing?’ But I would say, ‘we must wait, we must wait’.”

That opportunity came when Lehto went off. The BMW drivers could start pushing — and had to start pushing. The remaining GT-One, driven by the all-Japanese line-up of Ukyo Katayama, Toshio Suzuki and Keiichi Tsuchiya, had been the Toyota tortoise but was suddenly became the manufacturer’s only contender. It stepped up the pace dramatically, Katayama ending up with fastest lap of the race.

Toyota had ground to make up, but it looked more than capable of doing it even though Dalmas and co let themselves off the leash. That is until Katayama suffered a high-speed tyre blow out with just under an hour to do.

The GT-One had been forced onto the kerbs at the entry of the first chicane on the Mulsanne Straight as a result of an erratic move by, of all things, a BMW. Wealthy privateer Thomas Bscher, who was driving a reworked 1998-spec BMW, moved over the faster Toyota in a move that is difficult to comprehend today.

With the blow-out and resulting bodywork damage from the flailing tyre, Toyota lost Le Mans for a second time in two years. It was sure it had enough to win the race. Ove Andersson, the late boss of TMG, didn’t pull his punches. Bscher had cost Toyota the win with what he described as “the worst piece of driving I have ever seen”. It was surely an exaggeration, but his words underlined both Toyota’s frustration and disappointment.

Hans Reiter, the race engineer on the winning BMW, admits that he can’t disagree with Toyota that it was going to win the race.

“I’d come to the realisation that they were going to catch us,” he recalls. “I was so nervous that I couldn’t hold my pencil. Looking back, I really don’t think we would have won if they hadn’t had their problem.”