Why Toyota is giving a scapegoat a second chance

Bizarre yet expedient. That's how I would describe the recall of Nicolas Lapierre to Toyota's World Endurance Championship squad two-and-a-half years after he was dropped.

Lapierre's return to the Toyota ranks to drive its third car at the Le Mans 24 Hours and, by way of preparation, the Spa WEC round in May is strange on two counts. It is an unlikely volte-face for a manufacturer that's from a nation where the concept of saving face - or rather not losing it - is part of daily life.

Equally strange is why a manufacturer that didn't trust Lapierre with its championship hopes in 2014 now believes he's fit for purpose to jump aboard a car that has to be ready to take the biggest prize in endurance racing.

Toyota isn't running a third car at Le Mans for the first time since 1999 to make up the numbers - it will be there on the grid to ramp up the percentages as it seeks that elusive first win in the 24 Hours.

That's the bizarre bit. The expedient part concerns the problem Toyota Gazoo Racing - to give it its full name - was facing a few weeks ago.

Toyota development driver Ryo Hirakawa has been groomed for promotion to the LMP1 squad since last year. Witness his drive with the TDS Racing LMP2 squad in last year's European Le Mans Series and at Le Mans, and a similar deal with G-Drive/DragonSpeed this season. But when push came to shove, he didn't quite stack up during winter testing and it was decided that he wasn't ready to make the step up.

That left a vacant seat in the third TS050 HYBRID alongside Stephane Sarrazin and Yuji Kunimoto, and very little time to fill it. There was also the problem that there was only minimal testing scheduled between decision time and the Spa 6 Hours at the start of May.

Toyota needed someone who was plug-and-play. And so entered the name Nicolas Lapierre into the equation.

The Frenchman hasn't exactly been idle since losing his drive at Toyota. He happens to have won his class twice at Le Mans over the past two years and claimed the P2 title last season with Signatech Alpine. He's even done a bit in the World Touring Car Championship with Lada, as well as getting his butt in a GT3 car here and there.

The connection between the majority of his post-Toyota programmes is ORECA. The machine in which he took the P2 crown last year might have been called an Alpine A460 on the entry list, but everyone knows it was an ORECA-Nissan 05. The French organisation was also a key technical partner in Lada's factory touring car squad of 2015-16.

And ORECA is - and this tends to be overlooked in a way that Joest's not entirely dissimilar role with Audi wasn't - an integral part of the Toyota P1 set-up. It would have been able to offer reassurances that Lapierre is still the driver he was when he notched up six WEC victories with Toyota in 2012-14, and then help facilitate his release for two races from his new Signatech Alpine contract.

Toyota felt confident enough to offer Lapierre a deal before he'd even as much as driven one of its LMP1 cars again - he was signed before his first run in the latest TS050 HYBRID at Paul Ricard last week. It had much more confidence in him, it seems, than when he slithered off the track in a sudden and torrential downpour at the Austin WEC round in 2014.

Has Toyota really changed its mind on Lapierre? Of course not. The decision to bench him after his Austin off, which in turn followed a high-profile shunt on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans three months before, was a knee-jerk reaction to the threat that it might not win the WEC crown.

Lapierre was ultimately a scapegoat for Toyota's failure to win Le Mans in 2014, a year when it had something it didn't have on its near-miss last year: a clear performance advantage. It couldn't afford to miss out on second prize as well. The French driver was a victim of the pressure on Toyota to atone, at least in part, for the failure at Le Mans by winning the championship.

You could argue that Toyota's decision was justified because Sebastien Buemi and Anthony Davidson did go on to seal the title without Lapierre beside them in the #8 car. Would the marque have done so had it retained him? That's impossible to say for sure, but the answer is: probably.

When we talk about Lapierre's incidents at Austin and Le Mans, and the one the year before at the 24 Hours, we should never forget that they all happened when he arrived on an extremely wet section of track on slick tyres.

Nor should we forget who else crashed when light rain intensified big-time over the Circuit of the Americas in September 2014.

Mike Conway, who went on to get a full-season Toyota drive for 2015, had multiple offs, including one at the Turn 12 right-hander where Lapierre had the misfortune to beach his TS040. Timo Bernhard also left the track in his Porsche, and that was after he'd been into the pits to change to slightly more suitable tyres.

That's right, some of the other P1 cars had already pitted to change to grooved rubber - the Porsches to intermediates and one of the Audis to full wets - at a time when Toyota left its drivers out on slicks. So to my mind Toyota was complicit in Lapierre's downfall.

Toyota handled Lapierre's departure before the Fuji round in 2014 very badly, first saying he had been rested and then coming clean by admitting that he wouldn't be driving for it again. On the other hand, it treated him well financially: it paid Lapierre through '15.

Some may interpret Lapierre's return to Toyota as an attempt by the manufacturer to assuage its guilt for unfairly dumping him in 2014. The late nature of his signing - the fact that he's plugged a hole at short notice - means I don't see it like that. This was an entirely pragmatic decision.

But the fact that he'll be back in Toyota's garish team kit this year is an admission. An admission, tacit or otherwise, that it got it wrong when it flicked Lapierre in October 2014.