Can Rebellion stop Toyota?
The privateer team was closer to defeating LMP1’S only manufacturer squad than it looked last year – and several new factors could help it further this weekend
Why the top LMP1 privateer had the pace in 2019 but needs a perfect run
“We must do the perfect job: no driver mistakes, no team mistakes – we must not beat ourselves.” That’s familiar rhetoric from ORECA boss Hugues de Chaunac ahead of the Le Mans 24 Hours. He almost certainly uttered something similar in the days when his team was fielding Chrysler Vipers in the 1990s or Judd-engined Dallaras in the 2000s. But it also hints at what might have been at the French enduro last year for the Rebellion Racing squad run by his organisation.
Rebellion could have won the last edition of the 24 Hours 15 months ago. And the ‘could’ here means ‘had the pace’ to win, and it had nothing to do with the system of success handicaps that played a big role in allowing the team to vanquish the Toyotas at Shanghai and Austin during the 2019-20 World Endurance Championship. The #3 Rebellion-gibson R-13 shared by Gustavo Menezes, Thomas Laurent and Nathanael Berthon was right in among the Japanese cars on average lap times at Le Mans last year.
The 15 laps that the car finished in arrears down in fifth place was largely the result of two off-track incidents. That goes a long way to explaining de Chaunac’s words.
“We have to be 100% in all respects in case Toyota has problems,” he says. “I am very humble when talking about our chances because as a privateer we are not at the same level as Toyota in terms of preparation. Our only chance to do something is to avoid mistakes.”
History wouldn’t be on de Chaunac’s side if he proclaimed that Rebellion is going to win Le Mans. Privateers only claim the biggest prize in sportscar racing very occasionally. But the Swiss entrant, the top indie in the LMP1 division over the past
decade, did have a genuine chance in 2019.
It is impossible, of course, to declare with any certainty that Rebellion would have won Le Mans last year had Laurent and Menezes avoided their mistakes. The Frenchman lost it under braking in light rain for the second chicane on the Mulsanne Straight in hour seven, while Menezes beached the car in the gravel at the Porsche Curves in the 18th hour as he strived to catch the BRE Engineering entry ahead of him in third place.
But it is there in black and white that the best of the Rebellions was with the Toyotas on pace. Menezes, Laurent and Berthon were,
in fact, slap bang in the middle of the two Toyota TS050 HYBRIDS on most laptime metrics. The car was a shade slower than the #7 Toyota driven by Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez that should have won, and a touch quicker than the car shared by Fernando Alonso, Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima that prevailed after the race threw up one final twist.
The 100-lap average for the #3 car was a tad over three tenths in arrears of that for the #7 Toyota and a similar margin ahead of the #8 entry. Menezes, meanwhile, was less than two tenths behind Conway at the top of the driver averages calculated from the fastest 50 laps. That explains why Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director Pascal Vasselon suggests that Rebellion, which is back up to two cars for the race, will be a contender in what will be its swansong Le Mans campaign.
“It was not one or two laps that #3 was faster than our #8 car,” says Vasselon. “It was faster under the two key performance criteria used by the organisers: the fastest 100 laps and the fastest 20% of race laps. The Rebellion also overtook #8 three times in the race and pulled away.”
Vasselon reckons that the Equivalence of Technology, the means used to equate the performance of the hybrid factory car and the non-hybrid privateers, was pretty much spot-on at Le Mans in 2019. “When you have one of the non-hybrids exactly between our two hybrids, then you cannot have a better EOT than that,” he says. “The #3 car was a little bit behind #7 and a little bit ahead of #8.”
Vasselon has described last year’s EOT as “perfect”, though the rulemakers – the FIA, and WEC promoter and Le Mans organiser the Automobile Club de l’ouest – haven’t quite agreed with him. For 2020, there’s been a 7kg increase in the minimum weight of
“We have to be 100% in all respects in case Toyota has problems. Our only chance is to avoid mistakes”
the TS050S, which still means they are running 37kg lighter than they have over the first six races of the current WEC campaign.
The pace of the Rebellion last year was, however, one of the reasons why the system of success handicaps was never on the agenda for Le Mans. It was always the plan for the slate to be wiped clean for the 24 Hours, which was originally scheduled as the final round of the 2019-20 WEC.
But Rebellion isn’t so sure that the EOT was quite as perfect
“I would definitely say I was ragging it out there. I was always closer to the limit than I wanted to be”
as Vasselon believes. Menezes thinks that he and his teammates had to drive nearer to the limit than the Toyota drivers to achieve comparable lap times. “The fact was that we had to push harder than they did,” he says. “I would definitely say I was ragging it out there. I was always closer to the limit of where I felt comfortable than I wanted to be.”
Bruno Senna has replaced Berthon in the full-season R-13 after sharing last year with Andre Lotterer and Neel Jani, while the Frenchman has moved over to the extra entry for Le Mans to drive alongside two-time race winner Romain Dumas and Louis Deletraz. Senna believes that the advantages provided by the TS050’S hybrid system are almost impossible to overcome for Rebellion. “The hybrid boost gives them such a huge advantage in traffic,” he explains. “It as good as destroys the competition between us and
Toyota. It would have been better if the EOT had removed some of their boost and maybe given them a bit more conventional engine power. That way they could have created a real race between us.”
The EOT has, however, addressed two factors that went against Rebellion last year. From the start of the current season, the advantages Toyota enjoyed in the length of stint between pitstops and the time its cars spent refuelling have been removed. The privateers should now be able to complete the same 11-lap stints around the 8.47-mile Circuit de la
Sarthe on a tank of gas as the TS050.
That is not the only change to the LMP1 landscape since Le Mans last year. Toyota has undertaken the biggest update to the TS050 since the introduction of what was the first turbocharged car in its line of WEC contenders stretching back to 2012.
What the new high-nose aerodynamics will give the marque at the 24 Hours isn’t clear. The only outing for the revised machine in low-downforce Le Mans trim was at Spa last month in mostly wet conditions and with the success handicaps in place.
Wet weather at Le Mans, not quite the statistical certainty you might imagine for an autumn race, could also change the balance at the front of the field. The R-13 has never been strong in the rain, never more so than last time out at Spa.
Rebellion has admitted that at least part of the problem was that its weather forecast predicted only showers, whereas the track was wet for the first half of the six-hour race. “We followed our forecast and went for a full-dry set-up,” explains de Chaunac. “We were also very conservative in those conditions, because we knew we couldn’t do anything to improve the car during the race.
But it is also true that we have never had a good test session with the car in the rain, so wet conditions are a handicap for us.”
Senna is more damning of the R-13’s lack of wet-weather prowess. “The car just doesn’t work in the wet and we don’t really have any answers,” he says. “Maybe it’s something to do with the suspension kinematics, but that’s just speculation on my part. All I know is that if it rains, it will be game over for us – we’ll lose a lap in an hour and a half.”
Senna isn’t dismissing Rebellion’s chances out of hand, but he reckons it will be a tall order for the team to beat Toyota:
“It is going to be tough, but we believe we are more on top of some of the reliability issues we’ve had than we have ever been. The only way we can fight is if we have no mechanicals. Can we win? It’s possible. You know Le Mans chooses its winners.”