CAN TOYOTA FINALLY CRACK IT?
GETS READY TO DEFEAT THE CHALLENGE OF LE MAN S
Has a team ever been so wellprepared for the Le Mans 24 Hours? That’s a question that has to be asked about Toyota as it bids for an elusive first victory in the French enduro this year.
The Japanese manufacturer hasn’t just been pounding around the test tracks of Europe in the opening months of the year with its already-proven TS050 HYBRID; it has also been gearing up for the big race in an altogether different way. It has been preparing for the unexpected.
The task this time around, says Toyota Motorsport Gmbh technical director Pascal Vasselon, is “to beat Le Mans” in a year when it has no factory opposition and is up against privateers only in LMP1.
And that means reacting correctly to the kind of problems that deprived it of a clear-cut chance of victory in three of the past four editions of the great race.
“We failed through unexpected problems – what I would call Le Mansspecific problems – that we obviously did not handle correctly,” explains Vasselon. “My personal feeling, looking at the past two years, is that we beat ourselves.”
Vasselon is talking about a run of relatively minor issues – but ones that had major consequences – in 2014, ’16 and ’17 that pulled the rug from underneath Toyota when it was sitting pretty at the head of the field. The task for this year is to be able to overcome such problems should they occur.
Dealing with the unexpected has been top of Toyota’s list as it prepares for Le Mans 2018. It explains a slightly eccentric routine during pre-season testing that has involved sending a car out with a tyreless rim, learning how to change components in the fastest possible time and making sure that each driver is au fait with the complicated systems of the twin-hybrid TS050.
The landscape has changed at the front of the World Endurance Championship for the 2018-19 ‘superseason’. Porsche’s withdrawal from the LMP1 ranks at the end of last season, a year on from Audi’s disappearance, means that Toyota is the clear favourite as the only manufacturer left standing in P1.
Manufacturers generally have the biggest budgets, the best organisation and strongest driver line-ups.
All those things apply to Toyota this time as it goes up against Rebellion, SMP Racing, Dragonspeed, Bykolles and the Manor Ginetta team. But it also has an in-built advantage under myriad technical agreements that cover the WEC superseason.
The promise of lap time parity made to the independent teams running non-hybrid LMP1 machinery on the announcement of the superseason last September wasn’t quite what it seemed. The reality is that Toyota has been given an advantage of half a second per lap over the eight and a half miles of the Circuit de la Sarthe under the Equivalence of Technology rules being used to balance the hybrid and non-hybrid machinery.
The rulemakers – the Automobile Club de l’ouest and the FIA – say that this is a necessary buffer to ensure that the rules breaks the privateers have been granted do not result in them going faster than Toyota. The Japanese manufacturer simply suggests that it wasn’t going to agree to parity of lap times and had FIA statutes on rules stability on its side.
Toyota has made concessions, most dramatically in the number of laps the TS050S can go between pitstops. Last year, it hit 14 laps on occasion, but this year it’s limited to 11. The privateers are allowed to do just 10 green-flag laps on a tank of fuel.
Toyota has a threefold advantage at Le Mans. In addition to the pace and mileage advantages, the TS050S will spend less time in the pits.
The time taken to refuel the two different types of P1 car have been set up to give Toyota a five-second margin.
All this explains a change of approach for a manufacturer that will again be running two cars at Le Mans this year. The expansion to three entries for Le Mans was never destined to be continued. It was off the agenda even before Porsche’s announcement that it wouldn’t be returning to LMP1 this year.
“If you want to beat Porsche and Audi you have to outperform them,” explains Vasselon. “Then you have to make this performance reliable. Testing before was all about mileage, mileage, mileage. This year performance has not been a priority.
“In the past we have not given a lot of time to the team to prepare for things that do not go as expected. This year has been the opposite. We have sacrificed mileage to give the team the opportunity to learn how to handle a car that comes back on three wheels, a car where everything blacks out on the driver.”
Vasselon has invoked the word ‘fake’ from the ‘fake-news’ term of the moment to describe the kind of problems Toyota has been simulating during its three endurance tests leading up to the start of the WEC season at Spa last month. Running the car around with only three Michelin tyres is probably the most extreme example of the kind of fake problem it has thrown into the mix during its pre-season preparation, but the TMG squad has tried to simulate a whole host of issues.
“We want to train our guys to change parts that normally should not need changing,” explains John Litjens, TMG’S LMP1 project leader. “We made a long list of things that might need to be changed and we now know the time it takes to change them.”
Toyota has twice run a TS050 for a lap with a rim sans Michelin tyre. It ran without a front tyre at the Algarve circuit in Portugal and without a rear at Motorland Aragon in Spain. “it was done to simulate a flat tyre,” explains Litjens. “We wanted to see what the driver felt and to understand what speed he could come back to the garage without causing major damage. But we also wanted to see how the systems reacted to the wheel-speed sensors giving different information to normal.”
Training the drivers has also been part of the routine. “our engineers have come up with a kind of quiz to help train the drivers,” continues Litjens. “They ask, ‘If this happens, what do you do, what switch do you hit?’ The problem is that when the car is running well you don’t need all these solutions; you kind of forget about them. There are always back-ups, but sometimes it takes a long time to react, even for the race engineers.”
Toyota hasn’t been slowed down for this season and it has no intention, it says, of slowing itself down no matter how far it is in front of the Le Mans field. That’s because modern P1 hybrids need to be driven near to their limit to function properly.
“If we ask ourselves whether we should drop our pace if we have a big advantage, the answer would be no,” explains Vasselon. “These cars are designed to run at a given pace. If you start to drop the speed, you lose grip in the tyres and you recover more energy and saturate your battery. we have to keep the car within its working window. It would not be clever to run three seconds off the pace.”
There will be strict guidelines in place about what the drivers can do out on the track in traffic, but Vasselon insists that has been the case for the past couple of years. “we have had strong guidelines in place already, but this year they will probably be a bit stronger,” he says. “We don’t have all the answers, because accidents and contact are a recurring issue at Le Mans. For sure our drivers will have a very clear briefing.”
The next obvious question concerns team orders. Toyota could be in a position to use its likely dominance of the race to determine which of the two cars wins. Again, Vasselon says no change. “we have had a set of rules in place for a long time,” he explains. “You have seen many times that the fastest car goes in front, and it has been working reasonably well.”
Asked if that raises issues of the drivers taking unnecessary risks to try to prove they are the fastest, Vasselon responds: “Don’t you think that is their job? Racing is somehow a little bit dangerous and unpredictable. We will never transform it into an activity that is totally safe and predictable. We don’t want to and we can’t.”
Le Mans will never be predictable. The accident that put the third Toyota out of the race last year, when Nicolas Lapierre was hit up the rear by an LMP2 car into the Dunlop Chicane, is testament to that.
Nor should it be forgotten just how complex a modern twin-hybrid LMP1 racer is. There’s a lot more to go wrong on a Toyota TS050 HYBRID than a Rebellion or a Ginetta.
“Our cars are so complicated,” says Sebastien Buemi, who is teamed with Nakajima and Fernando Alonso in the #8 Toyota. “We have a front motor, a rear motor, a front ’diff, a battery. That means we have so many more chances of having an issue. We should be a little bit quicker than the privateers, but I don’t know how many times more complex our cars are.” ■
“I think that sometimes we beat ourselves” Pascal Vasselon