How Toyota overcame a traumatic trio of Le Mans defeats

In 2011 Toyota found itself on a crucial crossroads, stuck in between two motorsport programmes that both represented unfinished business for the Japanese giant. Two years earlier, its Cologne-based Formula 1 arm Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG) - recently renamed Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe - was one of the three teams that cleverly interpreted the new-for-2009 regulations and came up with a double diffuser.

Its TF109 came out of the gates strong and while it couldn't match Brawn's BGP 001 in the opening rounds, the Bahrain Grand Prix should have been the race where the operation finally scored its first victory after 125 attempts. But despite Jarno Trulli taking pole, the team shot itself in the foot with a poor tyre strategy call and lost the chance to break its duck.

The long-hoped for first win never came. At the end of the year, Toyota decided to pull the plug on its expensive F1 programme, while the development of its 2010 challenger was already at an advanced stage. It was a source of great frustration for Toyota, the unraced TF110 chassis on display at the team's Cologne headquarters a daily reminder of what could have been.

In the second half of 2011, TMG got the green light from Japan to focus on a new challenge that, much like F1, was an open-ended chapter in the company's history: Le Mans.

Toyota had finished second three times at the Circuit de la Sarthe, with the TS010 prototype in 1992, the SARD-entered 94C-V two years later and with the spectacular Toyota GT-One in 1999. The final car paved the way for its Formula 1 entry in 2002, and a decade on the Japanese marque opted to switch its attention back to the world's biggest endurance race.

"It was a difficult time after the withdrawal," Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe's managing director Rob Leupen reflects. "We did several things before we started working on the LMP1. We were looking into the GT class, but it was good to go back to Le Mans with an organisation that already tried to win it in 1998 and '99. We ticked all the boxes. The people, the technology and the mentality were there."

"The team was extremely motivated," Toyota's technical director Pascal Vasselon adds. "F1 was unfinished business for us. We were extremely frustrated about stopping in F1 at the moment when the team was coming together. The team was really keen on demonstrating what it was able to do."

Toyota partnered with French endurance specialists ORECA to help it with the transition to 24-hour races. Toyota's biggest challenge was solving the drivetrain puzzle. For the new World Endurance Championship in 2012, the FIA and ACO had introduced a hybrid rules package which went far beyond anything any other championship featured at the time.

Vasselon audibly lights up when asked about the technical challenge he and his team faced before deciding on using a super capacitator charged by a KERS unit.

"We did lap times that were as quick as the Peugeot V12, but with 50 percent of fuel and tyre consumption. To me, that tells you why hybrid technology was really the next step in racing and also in normal road car technology" Alex Wurz

"The degree of freedom was amazing," he says. "We made our simulations to select the best hybrid system, which was an extremely interesting and rewarding process for the engineers."

Toyota's next task was to source the best possible drivers. One of its first recruits was Peugeot's LMP1 ace Alexander Wurz, a two-time Le Mans winner with a decade of F1 experience as a racer and test driver, who was soon convinced over dinner that it had the technology needed to be a success.

"Knowing Toyota's capabilities and the wind tunnel experience they had from F1, for me it was a no-brainer," recalls Wurz (pictured below testing at Paul Ricard in 2012). "We agreed terms very quickly. I remember some of my Peugeot team-mates told me I was crazy to depart, because we were winning. But I was very sure about the project."

After Peugeot's sudden withdrawal on the eve of the 2012 season, Wurz would later be joined by former colleagues Anthony Davidson and Stephane Sarrazin, while Toyota also recruited Sebastien Buemi, Nicolas Lapierre and Kazuki Nakajima for 2012.

Uncharted territory

Despite all its know-how, developing and racing a high-powered hybrid unit was still uncharted territory for Toyota and it made for some exciting moments in early testing. Vasselon insists that the processes required to ensure mechanical reliability for a 300km grand prix were "relatively straightforward" to upscale for a 6,000km endurance race, but "the hybrid part was a different story".

"It was really unknown territory," he says. "We were obsessed by safety. You have a lot of concerns when you send your drivers out on track, that they don't risk anything. We achieved it, but it was difficult."

"The testing was extremely interesting, driving out of the garage for first time on hybrid power, completely silently," Wurz adds. "We had some electronic teething problems. For example, the brake-by-wire caused electromagnetic interference, which triggered a failsafe mode. We knew the car was safe, but we couldn't run properly for seven days.

"We were lucky to have a Toyota engineer from Japan with us who had worked on the Prius. He said they had the same problem when that car crossed the Tokyo underground and we fixed it by changing the wiring loom.

"That's one of many examples. During our first night session the team asked me to change a switch and I said I couldn't see anything because the steering wheel wasn't back lit. So in the end we just took a torch and glued it to the roof! We had to improvise along the way because we were under a lot of time pressure."

Wurz reveals that the drivers also had to adapt to a new style of driving. "Braking was no longer about how late you can brake, but how efficient and how long you can extend it into the corner," he says. "It was a bit weird at first, but it was very clear that it's such an amazing extra performance.

"We did lap times that were as quick as the Peugeot V12, but with 50 percent of fuel and tyre consumption. To me, that tells you why hybrid technology was really the next step in racing and also in normal road car technology."

Taking Audi by surprise

If developing a complex hybrid prototype wasn't challenging enough, Peugeot's withdrawal in January 2012 would create extra headaches. With Audi left as the sole full-season manufacturer entry to the revived WEC, the ACO pushed Toyota to expand its programme from selected rounds with a single car to a full-season two-car effort.

To complicate matters further, a testing crash ahead of the TS030's planned Spa debut destroyed the only available monocoque at the time, meaning Toyota would have to debut its sleek prototype at Le Mans.

"We had some very high ups and very low downs in our first Le Mans and we had so many things to learn" says Vasselon. "We took the lead after six hours. After that we lost one car after the other. It started with a huge crash for Anthony [Davidson at Mulsanne Corner], then at the restart Kazuki [Nakajima] collided with the DeltaWing [at the Porsche Curves].

"We were always carefully looking at [Joest] to see how they prepared and set up their garage, how close their drivers were with each other. It was good to look at the others, but it was also good to see your own team develop into a very strong team" Rob Leupen

"But somehow we achieved something against the absolute reference that was Audi. We took them by surprise."

Leupen looks back on Le Mans 2012 as "a very pleasant and rewarding time" after the tumultuous build-up to the race and, like Vasselon, relished the fight against the Audi's Team Joest, the endurance racing gold standard for over a decade.

"It was an enjoyable fight with a lot of respect," says Leupen. "For us they were the benchmark because they had been there for so long and they were experienced.

"We were always carefully looking at them to see how they prepared and set up their garage, how close their drivers were with each other. It was good to look at the others, but it was also good to see your own team develop into a very strong team. That was one of my biggest moments of joy of the whole era."

Wurz and Lapierre went on to take three wins - including an important home victory in Fuji with Nakajima - in the second half of a promising 2012 campaign. But the element of surprise it had enjoyed that season was well and truly gone for 2013, a year Vasselon describes as "terrible".

Audi struck back with its next evolution of the four-wheel drive R18 e-tron quattro, which featured a Williams-designed flywheel system and advanced electronics. It won six of the eight WEC races that year, including the first five on the bounce, with Toyota left to pick up the scraps.

"They reacted with the powertrain in a way that was not sustainable for us," Vasselon recalls. "The Balance of Performance at the time between diesel and petrol hybrid was welcome, but there was no real engineering process behind it."

Le Mans heartbreak

Toyota quickly shifted attention to the 2014 season, which would feature revised regulations and a new challenger in Porsche. The level of competition and technology would reach its zenith between 2014-17 and Toyota was determined to be at the forefront with the new TS040, an evolution of the TS030.

"In many aspects the 2014 regulations were incredible, including a well-engineered Balance of Performance," Vasselon explains. "It put in place an incredible playground for engineers with a complex equivalence between the different hybrid systems. The competition with Audi and Porsche was very close. For me it was the best period of LMP1 with incredible sports cars."

Toyota's TS040 proved extremely capable at Le Mans, with Nakajima claiming Toyota's first pole since 1999 in the #7 car he shared with Wurz and Sarrazin. When Lapierre crashed the sister car in the rain, all hopes were pinned on the leading #7 car, but it too faltered. After 14 hours an FIA sensor melted a wiring loom, which caused a fire and forced Nakajima to abandon the car.

Wurz describes the balance as "the best I've had at Le Mans", able to take Tertre Rouge almost flat, and attacked from lap one "to mentally hurt the competitors".

"We were very fast, we knew our competitor would be the sister car," Wurz says.

Its race-ending problem had been detected earlier in the race, and it was calculated that changing the wiring loom would cost one minute.

"Then the sensor came back and we thought we didn't need to change it anymore," remembers Wurz. "Unfortunately it then shorted and started burning when Kazuki was in the car. It was a real low, but that's Le Mans."

Despite comfortably sealing the World Endurance Manufacturers' crown and the drivers' title with Davidson and Buemi, Toyota was aching for revenge in 2015, but found itself incapable of fighting Porsche and Audi, whose lithium ion battery systems were proving to be the hybrid solution to have.

Toyota also worked on a battery system of its own, but decided to cut costs and waited until 2016 to implement its all-new powertrain, which also included a twin-turbo V6 to replace the naturally aspirated V8. It backfired as Toyota ended the year winless, while Audi and Porsche shared the spoils between them.

"When we were dominating in 2014 we did some savings for the next year because we thought we were good enough," says Leupen. "We knew there was a risk, but at the start of '15 we immediately realised that we were not in the game and that we had to react big time.

"[2016] deeply damaged the mental wellbeing of several people. It was very difficult to recover from such an incredible scenario. From a part of that trauma we will never recover" Pascal Vasselon

"After a very difficult 2015 we came back in 2016 with more resources, the turbo and a battery. Between '15 and '16 we had to find eight seconds per lap at Le Mans."

After a winless season in the abyss, Toyota's ebb and flow of competitiveness continued with a stronger showing in 2016, when the three LMP1 constructors converged towards a similar hybrid technology to power the most advanced race cars ever made.

At Le Mans that year, Toyota and Porsche delivered a thrilling battle while Audi hit trouble. On strategy Toyota managed to keep up with the slightly quicker race pace of the sole surviving Porsche and approaching the closing stages, Toyota's #5 crew of Nakajima, Buemi and Davidson had a healthy one-minute lead.

But with just six minutes to go, Nakajima started slowing down and as he crossed the line two minutes later to start the final lap, his Toyota gave out completely.

ORECA boss Hugues de Chaunac, an integral part of TMG's Le Mans bid, was one of many team members reduced to tears in the garage. If Toyota's 2014 loss was a hard blow to take, then 2016 delivered an uppercut.

PLUS: The most heartbreaking defeat of the last decade

"It was extremely sad because it deeply damaged the mental wellbeing of several people," Vasselon reveals. "It was very difficult to recover from such an incredible scenario. From a part of that trauma we will never recover. It would have been so rewarding to come back and win it."

An investigation brought to light that a linkage failed in the air line between the turbo and intercooler. Because Toyota never fully understood why that happened, it decided to change the design altogether.

"Even after a long analysis we didn't find any convincing quality issue," Vasselon says. "We just moved on from that technology we were using."

Wurz had stepped back from full-time driving at the end of 2015 and in his new position as team advisor and ambassador also had his role to play in the team's recovery. After a brainstorming session with Leupen, Vasselon, project leader John Litjens and team manager John Steeghs, they came up with the idea to collect videos from the drivers, which were sent to all the employees.

"It was like flipping a coin," he says. "It was that final message everyone needed to turn depression into motivation.

"Another key aspect was that [Toyota Motor Corporation president] Akio Toyoda and [Gazoo Racing Company president] Shigeki Tomoyama kept standing behind the project. They motivated us from the global Toyota family and that was a multiplying effect."

"For me and for the team 2016 was a very emotional one," Leupen adds. "This happens once in a lifetime. It was heartbreaking for everybody, but then you try to put it aside - 2017 was much more of an issue for me."

Lightning strikes twice

If 2016 was the most memorable defeat in Le Mans history, then 2017 was the most puzzling. With a team desperate to set the record straight and Audi now gone from LMP1, TMG took three TS050s to fight against two entries from its remaining competitor Porsche at Le Mans. Toyota arrived in dominant form, too, with Buemi, Nakajima and Davidson winning the first two rounds at Silverstone and Spa.

At Le Mans, Kobayashi took an astonishing pole in the #8 entry he shared with Sarrazin and Mike Conway, his 3m14.791s smashing the lap record and over two seconds quicker than the fastest Porsche. Team returnee Lapierre shared the third #9 car with Jose Maria Lopez and Yuji Kunimoto.

"If you see a movie with that scenario you would say it's not realistic. There was a lot of frustration and the feeling that the Le Mans gods were definitely against us" Pascal Vasselon

But despite confirming its dominance in the early stages of the race, all three cars fell before half distance. First the #8 car dropped out of contention after seven hours with an MGU issue, which was later attributed to a manufacturing error - although it would still recover to second.

In the tenth hour lightning struck twice for the other entries. The #9 car of a charging Lapierre was hit by an LMP2 competitor. The Frenchman made an attempt to crawl it back to the pits, but a puncture had wreaked too much havoc on the car to continue.

What happened moments before with the #7 car of Kobayashi, however, has already gone down in Le Mans lore. As Kobayashi was waiting to enter the track at pit exit during a safety car period, he mistook a cheering Vincent Capillaire for a marshal, and the Frenchman's thumbs up for a go signal. He then stopped and started a second time, which damaged the Toyota's clutch. On the first full racing lap, Kobayashi ground to a halt.

"In the end the team threw it away because of mistakes," Leupen (below, left with de Chaunac) says candidly. "With the cars and the potential we had, for me it was more severe [than 2016] and it took more time to recover. You then have to go back, look for the mistakes and work hard from it. We had to make some difficult changes in the team."

Vasselon adds: "If you see a movie with that scenario you would say it's not realistic. There was a lot of frustration and the feeling that the Le Mans gods were definitely against us. But we have to thank Toyota Motor Corporation for its consistency within the company to never give up."

Rather than cutting its losses, Toyota doubled down on its commitment to Le Mans, even though it ended up being the only manufacturer in the top class in the 2018-19 super season. Porsche's withdrawal meant Toyota would race for the win against non-hybrid privateers, who were unable to challenge the TS050s despite a new Equivalence of Technology (EoT) formula. After three gut punches in four years, the 2018 Le Mans 24 Hours was the race that had to be won, failure was no longer an option.

Vasselon explains how TMG went to great lengths to train its crew for a wide variety of unforeseen circumstances, including recovery laps on three wheels: "We knew we had the fundamental reliability, but we didn't always react the right way when we were facing unexpected circumstances.

"We spent a lot of track time and sacrificed a lot of mileage to train the team to manage extraordinary circumstances. We simulated a lot of faults where nobody knew what would happen in advance, and then we would monitor and review how the crew and drivers would react."

A bit of madness

In the face of diminished competition, Toyota would have been forgiven for taking its foot off the throttle and focusing on finishing the race. But the #7 and #8 teams both went flat chat to try and be the crew that finally lifted Toyota's curse, featuring several jaw-dropping night stints from two-time Formula 1 world champion Fernando Alonso, who replaced Davidson in the #8 crew, and Conway in particular. Wurz describes it as "one of the most intense internal team battles I have ever seen".

"They all drove like hell without mistakes, it was one of the most stellar performances of any racing team I've ever seen," he says. "If you look at the lap times, it was a bit of madness."

"Considering the circumstances we should have managed the race and played it safe, which is exactly what we didn't do," Vasselon continues. "We were not interested in winning a slow race, we absolutely wanted to show that our car was able to beat any other car. That is why we had incredible pace in 2018.

"It will probably always be the fastest ever Le Mans if you consider the green lap pace. We really pushed the driver crews to be as fast as they could."

As Nakajima took the chequered flag on Sunday afternoon and finally brought the victory home in the car he shared with Alonso and Buemi, the burden of history and the weight of Toyota Motor Corporation's expectations finally dropped off the squad's battered shoulders. Toyota's past peaks and lows were crystallised in a mixture of elation and relief, emotions which were also visibly coursing through team boss Leupen in the pitlane.

"The relief was big, but it was also a feeling of 'job done'," reflects the Dutchman, who has worked at Toyota since 1995. "As we saw in 2016 and 2017, you don't just have to beat the competition, you also have to beat Le Mans and yourself. It was also a confirmation that it was worth continuing all this time and experience all the pain and the ups and downs."

"In my mind we should have already won Le Mans four times right now, the two wins don't compensate that for me, not at all" Rob Leupen

Toyota added a second Le Mans win at the end of the 2018-2019 super season and has since pledged its commitment to continue as the LMP1 era draws to a close and Le Mans switches to the new-for-2021 hypercars, which will be matched with a cheaper LMDh ruleset to bring in a much-needed injection of new blood.

Toyota is relishing the prospect of facing new opposition, but not because any additional success would make up for its traumatic trio of near-misses.

"In my mind we should have already won Le Mans four times right now, the two wins don't compensate that for me, not at all," Leupen states firmly.

"We look towards the future with a cry and a smile. A cry because we are putting the quickest cars to rest without having explored their full potential at Le Mans. The smile is because we give the organisation a chance to build a new car and showcase what Toyota can do. We want to drive and race against other teams and manufacturers, not only amongst ourselves.

"It's not only about technical dominance, it's also the management, to manage the BoP, and to get advantages through your drivers and through your race engineering. I think everybody is looking forward to that."