Toyota's long and despairing road to Le Mans victory

The ACO first opened the regulations to hybrids in 2009 (though Panoz raced a hybrid, the Q9, in 1998 but failed to qualify for Le Mans), and a privateer hybrid run by Hope Racing appeared in the 2011 running of the race. That year also saw the regulations relating to hybrids altered, allowing for greater levels of energy recovery and release, encouraging the big manufacturers to develop systems. This was the catalyst for Toyota’s involvement, with the rule shift making it viable to run a hybrid competitively, with the allowed output offsetting the extra weight.

Tadashi Yamashina, Toyota Motor Corporation’s senior managing officer and TMG chairman, was keen to point out the synergy between endurance racing and its production automobiles at the TS030’s launch. “We want to write a new page in the history of the Le Mans 24 Hours, as well as in the FIA World Endurance Championship, through our use of hybrid technology. In addition, we aim to learn from the experience of competing in such a challenging motorsport environment to enhance our production car technology.”

Toyota LMP1’s V8 wonder

Following Toyota’s F1 ethos, the car was to be built completely in-house, including the tub, with TMG developing the chassis and Toyota Japan the powertrain, under the Toyota Hybrid System Racing (THSR) label – a different approach from that taken by both Audi and Peugeot, whose chassis were built by Dallara and Capricorn respectively.

The TS030’s impressive 3.4-litre, NA V8 has been covered in detail. Highlighting the diversity of the LMP1 class at the time, Anthony Davidson, who was quickly drafted in by Toyota when Peugeot quit (with whom he was a factory driver), recalls the contrast of driving the two cars. “Moving from a very smooth diesel was a very strange experience, coming back to a quite a raw, buzzy, revvy V8 with not much torque (that came mostly through the battery pack). It was quite different to drive, you had to rev it to get anywhere in terms of the peak power of peak torque. So it took a little while to adapt to it.”

The TS030 was initially designed to run as a four-wheel drive, using a rear motor from Denso and a front unit from Aisin. However, it would debut as a rear-wheel-drive-only car, ironically thanks to a rule change lobbied for by Peugeot to cut energy recovery over a lap of Le Mans from 1MJ to 500KJ. As John Litjens, Toyota’s long serving chief project leader, of sports cars, explained at Le Mans in 2012: “At the time when the regulations allowed 1MJ we had to make a call on the recovery system, and the chassis is designed to accommodate 4WD. This meant there is still some weight penalty, but we had to make a call at that point and this is something we hope to improve.”

Overall, a rear-mounted motor was deemed to provide the best solution from a dynamics and packaging point of view. With the mass of the system at the rear, some flexibility was gained in terms of adjustment of weight distribution and housing the motor in the gearbox presented fewer packaging demands than one situated in the front of the monocoque.

Another unique feature of the TS030, compared to Audi’s R18 e-tron quattro and later Porsche’s 919, was the choice of energy storage system. Audi was running a flywheel-based setup, while Peugeot used batteries in its unraced 2012 hybrid. Toyota opted for a supercapacitor, as battery technology was far from where it is now in terms of energy and power density.

Team principal Pascal Vasselon outlined in 2012: “According to our studies, when we made the decision, the supercapacitor was the best solution,” he said, adding. “Soon the battery will become better. At the moment, batteries are very good for energy density. If you need to store lots of energy, you can do it with lower weight with a battery, but at the moment, you needed more battery weight to get the power density of a capacitor.”

Toyota’s early years: Lots of promise but no Le Mans win

The TS030 was quick out of the box, says Davidson. “Obviously that came with reliability issues, and managing the hybrid was – and still is – a very difficult thing. But it was a very cleverly put together project. You had the might of TMG still left over from F1, with the brain power, but not necessarily the financial power at the start.” One area this resource restraint manifested itself was in the use of TMG’s impressive full-scale wind tunnel, the LMP team had to slot its development runs in-between the many commercial customers that flocked to the facility.

Testing the car was not without its challenges, Davidson recalling one particular issue where a very high frequency vibration would setup through the car and into the steering wheel at high speed. “We would get out of the car and all the drivers complained because we had numb hands!”

The solution, at least temporarily, was pleasingly low-tech, says Davidson. “We ironed it our originally by putting grip tape on the steering wheel. In Le Mans, the grip tape started to come off, and I was spending most of my time going down the straights fiddling with this tape trying to stick it all back into the right place.” By the time he returned from his recovery (the 2012 crash at Mulsanne broke his back), a more permanent fix had been found.

There was clearly potential in the TS030, and Sébastien Buemi, the only driver still with Toyota who was there at the start of the project, remembers being immediately impressed. “I think that Toyota came in with a lot of F1 experience with a lot of knowledge. So even the first car, in my opinion, was better than the Audi.”

It is often said that it takes three years to win Le Mans as newcomer and for Toyota, it looked like that may be the case. At its first try, the compressed development schedule, compounded by a testing accident at Le Castellet for Nicolas Lapierre that totalled a car, meant the team rolled into Le Mans having never completed a 24-hour test (most works teams will run at least two of these).

Just before the race, Vasselon said: “Even if we have fixed issues that we have discovered, we are expecting to find other problems. The ACO people told us that usually Le Mans generates problems that people do not find in any other endurance session, so we are looking forward to that. We have never done a 24-hour test, so we are finding and fixing issues; Le Mans will be the first step.”

With one car taken out by a crash and the second succumbing to engine failure before the halfway point, there would be no debut miracle for the TS030, though as Buemi asserts. “I think that in 2012, we had already a better car. Obviously, reliability was not there and we were down on power [because of the equivalence of technology], but the car won three races at the end of the season.”

For 2013, new tubs were built that did away with the openings and fixtures for the front-mounted motor, resulting in a both a reduction in weight and an increase in stiffness.

Speaking before Le Mans, Litjens remarked that their car appeared to be running a power deficit to the Audis, to the extent that the TS030 drivers were unable to keep up with the R18s through the fast second sector of the track, which includes the run down to the Mulsanne corner and up to Indianapolis. Thanks to extensive engine and hybrid development work over the winter and early 2013 season, combined with increased fuel allowance — from 70 to 73 litres — the team did manage an impressive increase in the number of laps run between pitstops. Where the TS030 could hit 12 lap stints, the R18 topped out at just ten. Unfortunately for Toyota, come the race and despite grabbing an early lead, this advantage was not sufficient to make up for its lack of race pace compared to Audi.

As 2014 rolled around, so did a new car, the TS040, now with true all-wheel drive running front and rear motors. According to Davidson this was when the car really came alive. “The biggest step was really when we were allowed to start using the front motor as well as the rear. That’s when we really started to learn all the tricks of the trade, how you marry the front and rear motor together to improve the balance of the car, both in braking and acceleration. It was fascinating and so powerful, honestly it was brilliant.”

Could this be Toyota’s year? For much of the 2014 Le Mans race it looked like the No7 was on course for the win, having qualified on pole and lead the pack for much of the first 14 hours, surviving an early deluge that caught many unaware. However, at around 5 am on Sunday morning it suffered an electrical fire and had to retire after completing 219 laps. Toyota later said the fire originated in the connections to the FIA/ACO data logger. The No8 TS040 crew staged a valiant comeback, the car having dropped several laps in the first hour of the race for repairs, after it was involved in the same melee as the No3 Audi during the early-race downpour. The No8 eventually crossed the line in third, with a five-lap deficit to the leading Audi. Once again, Toyota had showed great promise but, on the day, failed to deliver.

Toyota turns to turbos for Le Mans

Toyota had another disappointing year in 2015. Although its revised TS040 provided a good step in performance over the 2014 car, and even with ever-increasing investment in the project, the development rate of both Porsche and Audi left the Japanese/German team trailing. Toyota therefore opted to completely revamp its programme for the 2016 season, bringing forward the introduction of an all-new engine while also switching to a battery, rather than a supercapacitor-based energy recovery system.

Initially, the team had planned a staggered technology phase-in: the battery ERS for 2016 while retaining the existing naturally aspirated V8 until 2017. However, after the 2015 Le Mans race, it was decided to bring both together.

The TS050 arrived powered by a direct injected, twin-turbocharged V6 engine displacing 2.4 litres, augmented by an 8 MJ hybrid system (up from 6 MJ in 2015). Energy recovery was still purely kinetic, with MGUs on both the front and rear axles.

Speaking at the opening Silverstone race of the WEC in April of that year, Toyota’s Hisatake Murata, head of the engine department for racing, explained that switching to the turbocharged engine at the last minute presented a major challenge, with the development programme lasting a mere ten months. The choice of a V6 was a result of Toyota’s simulations showing it to be the best compromise within the fuel flow-limited regulations, providing a balance between package size, frictional losses and combustion efficiency.

Toyota’s final lap Le Mans heartbreak

The new car certainly looked like it could deliver and in terms of sheer pace, it was clearly the pick of the field. But come Le Mans, Toyota would be subject to its cruellest defeat to date.

Two Toyotas and one Porsche were still running on the same lap at 21 hours into the race. With one hour left, the lead No5 Toyota, with Kazuki Nakajima at the wheel, had a 30-second lead over the Porsche in second. A sudden pitstop by the Porsche with three laps remaining increased that lead.

Overlooking the start finish straight that year, it seemed certain that victory was finally, and deservedly, Toyota’s. Then, with just three minutes left to run on the clock, Nakajima’s car ground to a halt almost directly opposite the Toyota pit garage. There was an air of disbelief throughout the paddock.

Behind the scenes, Toyota engineers were working feverishly to devise a fix and get the car running again. A cracked boost pipe had caused the engine to shut itself down as a failsafe. It could still theoretically run but Toyota hadn’t incorporated a workaround. The team figured out how to get the car moving again, but not before Neel Jani whipped past in the No.2 Porsche to seize victory.

Rubbing salt in the wound, though Nakajima finally completed his lap it was outside of the six minutes the rules allowed, meaning the car was not classified. The sight of Nakajima, devastated and in tears, along with most of the Toyota crew, remains one of the enduring memory of Le Mans and a reminder of just what a harsh mistress it can be. As Buemi muses. “We missed out on the wind so many times, it was mentally very difficult. We thought we were a little bit cursed.”

Toyota denied once more at Le Mans, 2017

Understandably, it was almost assumed that 2017 would finally be Toyota’s year. The 050 was an absolute weapon as demonstrated by Kamui Kobayashi’s stunning lap record during qualifying at Le Mans, a scarcely believable 3min 14.791sec. Porsche (Audi having withdrawn by this point) had nothing to answer that sort of pace, and Kobayashi was convinced he could have gone quicker still. But Le Mans wasn’t done with Toyota yet.

The race for the win boiled down to a battle of the mechanics, and at one point it even looked like an LMP2 might take the top step of the podium. Despite two of the three Toyotas succumbing to on-track incidents, it looked like the team may still snatch the win when the leading Porsche suffered an engine failure. But then the final TS050 ended up in the pits having to have its front hybrid motor replaced.

Porsche had already had to do exactly the same fix on its remaining 919, but two factors were at play. Firstly, its failure occurred much earlier in the race, giving it more time to figure out a recovery strategy. Second, the Stuttgart team had, either by chance or design, made its front MGU easier to change.

In the Toyota’s case, it was necessary to almost totally dismantle the front half of the car, with the MGU being removed through the driver’s cockpit. It was also disadvantaged by the fact it had a standalone air-conditioning system to cool its battery, which took 25 minutes to re-gas during the repair.

Porsche meanwhile was able to drop its motor out through the underside of the nose. Toyota admitted that it had never had to change an MGU at a race, and Porsche’s attention to serviceability, even of components that were not expected to fail, played a decisive role in the final result. Toyota was once again the bridesmaid and there was murmuring that it would pull the plug, particularly with Porsche jumping ship at the end of the season. But it the team stayed, and so began its period of domination.

Toyota wins Le Mans at last

Finally, six years after its debut, Toyota would stand atop the podium at Le Mans in 2018, albeit without any other works manufacturer competition. There were no unwanted surprises and the TS050, in modified form from 2017, delivered an imperious 1-2. From that point on, there was no stopping Toyota, and each year since it has refined its operation in to one of the slickest ever seen in sports cars.

As Buemi sums up. “Finally, we started to win. And now we’ve been winning for a few years. We had less competition, now we have more again. I think that means we’re more motivated than ever to win this year, because we want to prove to the world that we did not win just because we were lucky or we were alone. We want to prove everyone that we are we’re great.”

In the new era of Hypercar, it will be a tall order for any of the newcomers to unseat Toyota, but then, Le Mans is never a done deal till the clock strikes 24.