$3bn and not a single win: the F1 team that Toyota kept on a leash

November 5th 2024

Toyota is back in Formula 1, 15 years after closing down its team having failed to win a grand prix. Matt Bishop explores what went wrong, and asks whether its new partnership with Haas will fare any better?

Istanbul Park, 2009: Toyota bagged five podium finishes in its final season but no victory

In light of the fact that it was revealed last month that the name of Toyota would return to Formula 1, in the guise of a “technical partnership” with the Haas team, it will be of interest to people who like to note anniversaries that the Japanese automotive giant announced its departure as an F1 constructor almost exactly 15 years ago (on November 4, 2009, to be precise).

In effect, what that announcement meant was that Toyota would renounce F1 with immediate effect, because the final grand prix of the 2009 F1 season had taken place in Abu Dhabi three days before, on November 1, 2009. Honda, a smaller corporation than Toyota but a bitter rival to it on both road and track nonetheless, had exited F1 11 months before, in December 2008, leaving Ross Brawn to take its team on, rename it eponymously, then win the F1 drivers’ and constructors’ world championships with it the following year, thanks to a stupendous effort by a small corps of indefatigable folk in Brackley and the outstanding performances of Jenson Button inside the cockpit of the Brawn BGP001. That same team, albeit increased in size and budget by an order of magnitude, and renamed Mercedes, has done conspicuously well since then, winning F1 grands prix and world championships with prolific assurance between 2014 and 2021.

That is not what happened in Toyota’s case, for no-one stepped forward to take the team on in its hour of need, à la Ross Brawn, and, as Honda had and other Japanese automotive corporations would during the global economic crisis of the time, Toyota was preparing to announce end-of-year results so poor that the continuation of its F1 team, in light of ongoing financial losses and planned factory closures, would have constituted eye-wateringly negative optics. Subaru and Suzuki had withdrawn from the World Rally Championship in December 2008, and Kawasaki had pulled out of MotoGP at the same time. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that both Toyota drivers scored points in the team’s final F1 grand prix, Abu Dhabi 2009, Kamui Kobayashi finishing sixth and Jarno Trulli seventh.

Toyota F1 car of Kamui Kobayashi in practice for the 2009 F1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix — Toyota’s last F1 car: Kamui Kobayashi in practice for the 2009 Abu Dhabi GP

That 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was the 140th F1 grand prix that Toyota had entered over eight seasons and, although it had bagged points (278½), podiums (13), pole positions (three), and fastest laps (three also), it had famously never won a race. I say “famously” because, although other teams have achieved points finishes, podium appearances, pole positions, and fastest laps in F1 grands prix without ever winning one, none has done so at such vast expense as did Toyota. Estimates vary, but I was working for McLaren during the latter period of Toyota’s time in F1, and our finance guys thought that Japan’s largest car manufacturer was spending around $450 million per annum by the end. Over the entire period of its F1 team’s existence – 2002 to 2009 – we reckoned that the total cost of that winless exercise had been in excess of $3 billion (£1.88bn).

Had Honda continued in F1 in 2009, instead of withdrawing and leaving it to Ross Brawn, Nick Fry, and their depleted band of stout-hearted followers, perhaps Japan’s second-largest car manufacturer would have won the 2009 F1 world championships, both drivers’ and constructors’, as Brawn did; but maybe it would not have done. Why not? Well, first, the Mercedes V8 that Brawn and Fry had rapidly arranged for their car to run instead of the Honda V8 for which it had been designed (a) turned out to be better and more powerful than the Honda engine and (b) more by luck than judgment fitted the Brawn chassis to the manner born. And, second, and just as important, there was a positive cultural shift, too.

Toyota's doomed attempt to conquer F1 with a Le Mans team: 'They couldn't handle the pace'

Toyota's debut season was a microcosm of why the manufacturer didn't succeed in F1 – Allan McNish, Mika Salo and race engineer Dieter Gass remember that eventful year

25th March 2022

By James Elson

I remember speaking to a senior Brawn engineer in an airport lounge during that golden summer of 2009, and, although he has asked me not to name him in the piece that you are now reading, which request I will of course honour, I remember what he told me as though it were yesterday. “When we were Honda,” he said, “we had much more money to splash around, of course we did. Things are much tighter now, budget-wise, obviously. But we’re also infinitely nimbler. Last year, if we wanted to get something done, we had to jump through hoops to get it approved. Now…” – and I remember him frowning as he searched for the right way to phrase the thought that was taking shape in his head – “…the power is in the room. Yes, that’s the difference now. The power is in the f***ing room.” And he grinned in celebration of having successfully coined the mots justes.

At Toyota, the power was never in the room. As a result, its F1 team could never be as nimble as F1 world championship-winning outfits need to be, and as Brawn became after it had been jettisoned by Honda. Toyota’s first F1 team principal, Ove Andersson — who had been a fine rally driver in the 1960s and 1970s then as the head of Toyota’s World Rally Championship team had delivered multiple WRC victories with Juha Kankkunen, Carlos Sainz Sr, Björn Waldegård, and Didier Auriol in the 1980s and 1990s — was always too loyal to the brand, and perhaps too apolitical by nature, to criticise explicitly the too-corporate modus operandi that had been force-fed from Japan into his Toyota F1 factory in Germany. But, chatting with him in F1 paddocks, and reading between the lines of his phlegmatic asides, I always felt that he would prefer to have been given a freer rein.

Why did the Japanese bigwigs supervise so directively Andersson and his senior European lieutenants, a group that included experienced and clever F1 engineers such as Mike Gascoyne and Pascal Vasselon? I think the answer to that very valid question is that they were aware that (a) success would be far harder to come by in F1 than it had been in the WRC, and (b) triumphs and/or, whisper it, disasters would be considerably more high-profile now that the Toyota brand was engaged in the pinnacle of global single-seater circuit racing. As a result, they were as fearful as they were ambitious. The fact that the company’s marketing whizzes had come up with the slogan ‘The car in front is a Toyota’, when in F1 the Toyota was at the time invariably one of the cars behind, did not help either.

Toyota F1 car of Mika Salo in 2002 F1 Austrian Grand Prix — Mika Salo scored two points in 2002, Toyota’s debut F1 season. It was two more than team-mate Allan McNish

If Andersson was Toyota’s motor sport éminence grise — and he really was, for he was already well into his 60s when his Toyota F1 team entered the sport in 2002, and he died in 2008, aged 70, before the end of its tenure — his more corporate foil was John Howett, 14 years his junior, who had become president of Toyota Motorsport in 2003. I always liked him, and I thought he was unfairly maligned. Misunderstood by old-school F1 ‘lifers’ who assumed that he had been parachuted into the team to make sure that Andersson led it in precisely the same manner as the rest of that enormous, and enormously successful, corporation was run – adopting kaizen, or the Toyota way – Howett had to toe the company line to some extent but he was actually a motor sport enthusiast of the old school himself. He had joined Toyota’s WRC team in the 1970s, and, although he then went on to do a number of dull but senior jobs in Toyota’s after-sales departments in the 1980s and 1990s, he was always a racer and a petrolhead at heart.

I remember him once waxing lyrical about the handling of the Lexus IS200 – saying that it was far better-balanced than the more powerful, faster, but heavier IS300 – and he was right, too, because, when I finally tried an IS200 a few years after he had praised it so effusively, I found that, yes indeed, it handled like the proverbial dream. And, years after that, on the morning of the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, when Aston Martin’s F1 driver ambassador Jessica Hawkins and I were travelling together from our team’s hotel in the unprepossessing city of Tsu to the Suzuka circuit, in a crummy hire car, she spotted an IS200 on the road and exclaimed, “Oh my god! Driving one of those is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!”

John Howett and technical director Pascal Vasselon before the 2009 F1 Singapore Grand Prix — Racing fan Howett (*left*) had to manage the 'Toyota way'

Moreover, when he was working for Toyota in F1, Howett owned a Ferrari F355 – perhaps he does still, for all I know – and he liked nothing better on a non-grand prix weekend than to go for a flat-out early-morning blat in it.

Toyota’s best seasons in F1 were 2005, when Jarno Trulli finished second in Malaysia and Bahrain, which were the second and third grands prix of that season, and 2009, its swansong year, when Trulli finished second once and third twice, and Timo Glock finished second once and third once. That year’s Toyota F1 car, the TF109, was a pretty decent machine. We will never know whether or not the Toyota F1 car that had been prepared for 2010, the TF110, would have been a winner, for it was stillborn, but there is no reason to suppose that it would not have been a successful evolution of the TF109, a car that had been driven to five podium finishes the year before. Indeed, in Bahrain in 2009, had the team’s race engineers optimised Trulli’s tyre strategy as they should have done, he might well have won. After all, he had started from the pole and he would go on to drive the fastest lap. But they did not, and he ended up third.

So how will Toyota fare now, and in the next few seasons, with Haas? Obviously I do not know – no-one does – but I think the partnership may work well for both parties. Haas’s engineers will benefit from the technical might of Toyota, and Toyota’s engineers may even learn from the operational fleet-footedness of Haas, as long as their most senior managers in Japan allow them to do so. I may be wrong, but I hope I am right.