Yahoo Autos Toyota Still Figuring Out Its Le Mans Defeat
Race teams find themselves swimming among one of four realities after each checkered flag waves.
The first two scenarios are fairly obvious. Winners sit at the happiest end of the spectrum, while those orbiting the podium can vary from feeling pleased to highly disappointed for being among the first losers. The latter conditions call for whisky or anti-depressants. There, you have the invisibles - the ones who were in the race but made no statement whatsoever, and at the bottom of the pile, you have the ‘what the hell just happened?’ crowd.
The Toyota Racing LMP1 Hybrid team owned that fourth and most unfortunate experience during June’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. As the heavy favorites, its trio of 1000hp TS050 Hybrids were felled by failure after repeated failure, with all this coming on the heels of 2016’s paralyzing defeat while three minutes from overall victory.
Confronted with its second consecutive collapse on the world’s biggest stage, the Japanese-German-French coalition that forms the Toyota LMP1 team is charged with answering the ‘what the hell just happened?’ question while preparing to resume the FIA WEC season next weekend at the Nürburgring.
With its workload divided between prepping its TS050s to resume the championship battle with its German rival, and completing its forensic-grade look into the myriad of mechanical and electrical problems that handed Porsche its third straight win at Le Mans, life within the Toyota team is anything but business as usual.
“It’s been quite focused to analyze how we failed at Le Mans,” Toyota LMP1 chief race engineer David Floury told RoadandTrack.com. “The analysis is ongoing, and the results have raised many questions. Some of them are technical, and some are [about] processes in the organization. For sure Le Mans was not the result we were aiming for and we cannot be happy with it.”
And that’s where Toyota’s story is unique among other high-level racing teams. Halfway through the year, and with six more endurance races to run before the championship is decided, the auto giant is stuck searching for answers from the last event while Porsche is dedicating all of its time and resources to winning its home race.
Straddling the recent past and immediate future, getting to the root of its Le Mans calamities is not only a necessity in its bid to win the 2017 FIA WEC LMP1 championship, it’s also key to initializing the design and development of its 2018 LMP1 cars. Considering the long lead times to create the supremely complex hybrid LMP1 machines, the longer it takes Toyota to trace and resolve each Le Mans malfunction, the longer its next LMP1 challenger will sit idle on CAD screens.
If there’s one comfort for the Toyota group, it’s the pace of its TS050s. Winners of the opening two six-hour “sprint race” rounds at Silverstone and Spa, the Toyotas held an advantage over Porsche’s 919 Hybrid, and in low-drag bodywork at Le Mans, the TS050s were in a different league until the breakages began.
Porsche has held the introduction of its higher downforce sprint bodywork for the ‘Ring, which could complicate Toyota’s plans to wash its recent sorrows away with a post-Le Mans win.
“For sure we have a championship to win,” Floury said of the team’s inevitable need to move forward. “We lost the battle at Le Mans, but we did not lose the war. We were strong at Silverstone and Spa, and had the speed to win at Le Mans. We didn’t fail on speed; we failed on reliability. The only concern is we have already introduced our sprint aero package, and Porsche will introduce their sprint package next week. The performance of the Porsche is the big question mark for us.”
The impact from the prolonged Le Mans investigations won’t be known until the next Toyota LMP1 car arrives - will it come later than expected? Most likely.
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