Why Toyota can make up for its heartbreak in 2017

Toyota should have won the Le Mans 24 Hours last year and it somehow managed to take the battle for the World Endurance Championship drivers' title down to the wire in Bahrain.

Yet in reality it wasn't a consistent challenger for race victories in 2016. This year could be different in the post-Audi LMP1 era, as Toyota bids to prevent Porsche sweeping to a hat-trick of Le Mans victories and WEC titles.

Logic suggests that Toyota should have made a bigger step than its only rival at the front of the WEC field. It must have had more to gain from the TS050 HYBRID package that's going into its second season than Porsche has had with the three-year-old second-generation 919 Hybrid, which in turn was a redesign of the 2014 original. What's more, new rules for 2017 could have played into Toyota's hands.

The key reason why Toyota should have made larger gains than its rival over the winter is that it is a newcomer to some of the key technologies that have long since been part of Porsche's package. The German manufacturer returned to top-flight sportscar racing with a small-capacity director injection turbo engine and a battery energy-storage system, technology to which Toyota switched last season.

That's why Toyota Motorsport GmbH technical director Pascal Vasselon suggests there is "more scope for progress, possibly more than Porsche, because we are newer in technologies such as small-capacity turbo engines".

That progress includes building an all-new version of the 2.4-litre twin-turbo direct-injection V6 introduced last year. Because development of the original was rushed after a decision to abandon its previous normally-aspirated V8 as late as June 2015, there were "several new ideas that we wanted to incorporate into the new engine", according to racing hybrid project leader Histake Murata at the marque's Higashi-Fuji technical centre in Japan.

He reckons only "a few small bolts" are shared between the 2016 and '17 engines. The hybrid systems on the latest Toyota have also been improved.

"We have redesigned the battery and the front motor," explains Murata. "The front motor-generator unit is smaller and lighter and the main change on the battery is increasing the high-voltage limit. By increasing the voltage, you increase the power."

Porsche has not been idle in development of the powertrain in the latest 919. LMP1 team principal Andreas Seidl reveals that a "big step has been made on the combustion engine [still a two-litre V4] in efficiency and power". He concedes, however, that "the development steps on the hybrid side are getting smaller - you simply reach a plateau".

Toyota has the ability not just to make strides in terms of its hybrid hardware, but also how to fully exploit it. By its own admission it was behind the game last year getting the most out of its systems over one lap in qualifying. It put particular emphasis on this during the official pre-season test at Monza earlier this month and ended up with a time that impressed even Porsche.

New aerodynamic rules that have raised the splitter at the front and decreased the depth of the diffuser at the rear could also have worked to Toyota's advantage. Last year, it produced an ultra low-downforce car for Le Mans that compromised what might be termed as the 'sprint' version of the car, which, of course, required higher levels of downforce.

This, according to Vasselon, "used of most of the elements of the Le Mans package", which left it short of downforce elsewhere, for reasons of economy. Witness the fact that this version of the TS050 was at its most competitive at Fuji and Spa, the two circuits requiring the least downforce.

"The starting point of the regulations did not generate the gap [between the two configurations] we had last year," explains Vasselon. "We do expect that our high-downforce aero package will be better suited to the [six-hour] WEC races, whereas last year we clearly had a deficit because our Le Mans development was quite extreme.

"The new regulations, I would say, better suit our resource limitations. All the development we were doing for Le Mans last year was really hurting the high-downforce version of the car. As we are not able to put a lot resources into a high-downforce package, we had to live with a baseline car that was conceived to shed drag."

His use of the word 'resources' is significant. Further regulation changes for 2017 limit each manufacturer to two aero kits and have reduced the number of windtunnel hours allowed to each manufacturer per calendar year from 1200 to 800. Vasselon suggests that Porsche has "less resource limitation" - though you'll find plenty of people at the German marque ready to disagree - and that allows it to develop bespoke high and low-downforce aero kits.

A further regulation change for 2017 that may or may not help Toyota is a sporting one. The per car limitation on tyres for qualifying and the race has been reduced from six sets to four, plus two joker tyres that can be introduced into the allocation at any point. The two extra sets allowed at the high-wear Shanghai and Sakhir circuits have also been removed in the latest rulebook.

Toyotas have traditionally been light on their tyres since it entered the LMP1 arena in 2012. The Toyota Gazoo Racing squad claimed its only WEC victory last year when it double-stinted Kamui Kobayashi at the end of the Fuji race in October. The decision to do the same with Sebastien Buemi in the sister car at the end of the opening hour at Spa in May gave it a lead it would hold until engine failure in the fourth hour.

This year, doing a double on a set of Michelins will be the norm courtesy of the new regs. Vasselon isn't sure whether the new tyre rule will be of benefit to Toyota, though he is happy to concede that his team is "not afraid of it." Rather, he says, it is "looking forward to the challenge".

Those are the reasons why Toyota could and even should be back in the hunt for the world titles it won in 2014. Of course, we won't know whether or not that's the case until the two P1 factories go head to head with their high-downforce contenders.

And that's not going to happen until the Nurburgring in mid-July courtesy of Porsche's decision to race its low-downforce Le Mans car at Silverstone and then Spa.