How Toyota beat Porsche over 23h55m

Toyota had Porsche beaten fair and square in last weekend's Le Mans 24 Hours. Anthony Davidson, Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima long since had the race in the bag when their TS050 HYBRID dramatically slowed with five minutes to go.

They had the measure of the chasing Porsche 919 Hybrid of Neel Jani, Marc Lieb and Romain Dumas over the final four hours. The Toyota trio had the smallest of advantages over the German car in terms of speed, which added to a strategic advantage made them a shoo-in for a first Le Mans victory for the Japanese manufacturer until those fateful final minutes.

Toyota deserved to win the 84th Le Mans, of that there is no doubt. Here are the factors why Davidson, Buemi and Nakajima won the 23 hours and 55 minutes of Le Mans.

Buemi, Davidson and Nakajima didn't look like potential winners early in the race. But it came good for Toyota's lead trio on Sunday.

That was crucial for the Japanese manufacturer and its bid for victory. While Davidson and co picked up pace, the sister TS050 of Kamui Kobayashi, Stephane Sarrazin and Mike Conway became less competitive as the race went on. Kobayashi's spin in the 21st hour, followed by a three-lap stay in the pits, clouds the issue, but it cannot be stated with any certainty that they would have beaten the Porsche in a straight fight.

The #5 Toyota had its problems early on - a sensor problem for Buemi on the opening lap of green flag running and a vibrating set of tyres for Davidson when he took over - but the truth was it wasn't a match for its sister car for much of the first half of the race.

That changed during the night.

"I really thought we were out of it," said Davidson, who was forced straight back into the pits after taking over the car for the first time. "We were a minute behind and with high [circuit] temperatures and a green track, we were struggling to keep the tyres alive.

"It all changed when I got in for the second time [in hour 12]. The car had switched back on and suddenly it was alive."

Explaining such a turnaround isn't easy. It can be the smallest difference in set-up, a tiny change in track conditions or maybe even the mindset of the drivers.

Davidson revealed that after getting out of the car following that triple stint, he gave Buemi a pep talk.

"Seb had been getting really frustrated with the car, but I woke him up and said, 'Don't dare doubt yourself'," explained the Briton. "When he got back in the car, he was straight on it.

"We rolled our sleeves up and started fighting. I'm proud of the way we turned it around."

Toyota had a strategic advantage that came into its own once the #5 TS050 and the #2 919 were more or less equal on pace on Sunday morning. That meant the Porsche had to be quicker if it was to win the race on merit. It was during the night, but not for the crucial final daylight hours.

Once that situation swung around, Porsche knew its back was against the wall. That explains why it rolled the dice and gambled on a creative strategy before the race was in even in its final quarter.

Toyota stopped both its cars early during the fourth and final safety car of the race in the 17th hour. Porsche didn't have that luxury, because it was facing the prospect of having to make a late-race splash that would have ruled out any chance of beating the Toyotas in a straight fight (it is worth pointing out that it looked like #6 was still in the mix at this point).

Not only that, but Porsche had to put the #2 onto a 14-lap fuel strategy - starting in the final quarter of Lieb's final stint - to avoid that splash. That came with a performance penalty. Jani admitted that he had to work hard to save fuel to achieve 14 laps once he took over the car from Lieb.

At the same time, it started quadruple stinting its Michelins for the first time during the hours of daylight. That would save it one change of tyres on the run to the flag.

Porsche reckoned it didn't have any other options if it was going to mount any kind of challenge to Toyota.

"When it became clear that it was going to be difficult to beat the Toyota, we had to try everything possible strategy-wise," said Porsche LMP1 team principal Andreas Seidl. "There wasn't any other choice."

Toyota consistently gained in the slow zones, or rather lost less time than Porsche under the local yellow conditions in which speed is limited to 80km/h. That state of affairs became evident early in the race and then played as one of the deciding factors in what should have been a Toyota victory.

Sometimes this could be explained away by the vagaries of racing. Bernhard should have emerged in the lead when Kobayashi handed over to Sarrazin at the end of the seventh hour, but because the Toyota's full service coincided with a slow zone, the Porsche was still behind after a lap nearly 50s off the pace.

That was merely good fortune for Toyota. Bernard would, however, lose more time in the slow zones before the end of a stint that culminated with the #1 Porsche being pushed into its pits with overheating problems. A trend was already beginning to emerge.

Lieb lost the better part of 20s to slow zones in the hour in which Toyota took a stranglehold on the race.

Davidson had closed down a six-second deficit to take the lead from Lieb after taking over from Buemi. Porsche again lost in local yellows when Davidson was in the pits and then haemorrhaged 20s in the space of three laps after the stops to slow zones.

It wasn't quite an equal fight, however. Lieb was coming to the end of a quadruple stint on a set of Michelins, whereas Davidson was in his second stint on his tyres. But what is clear is that the Porsche lost more through slow zones than its struggles with the tyres.

"There were a lot of slow zones in the Porsche Curves and that's where we make our time, whereas the Toyotas were fast down the straights," explained Lieb.

The fact that Porsche was on course to lose this race before the technical problem that robbed the #5 Toyota of turboboost on its penultimate lap begs a question: should it have opted for 14-lap stints from the beginning?

A shorter stint length meant there was a gain to be made during refuelling. The Porsches were routinely three or so seconds quicker from pit-in to pit-out, but that wasn't enough.

"We always knew that Toyota would be doing 14 laps," said Jani, "The problem was that we didn't gain enough with the short fill to make up for that."

Seidel stated that Porsche had opted for 13 laps for "strategical reasons". That's really not much of answer. To the question whether it was the quickest way, he offers a more telling response: "According to the parameters we used in our simulations, yes."

We are going to have to wait to find out what that really means. Seidl insisted that the two determining factors in Toyota gaining the upper hand were "slow zones and tyre performance".

That's true up to a point. Toyota's decision to go 14-laps on a tank of fuel forced Porsche into a tactical corner from which it could not fight its way out.