Why Toyota didn't really beat Le Mans

The Toyota curse is broken. After 19 failed attempts - and five runner-up finishes - it was 20th time lucky for the Japanese manufacturer in the 86th running of the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Toyota went into this year's race as the heavy favourite. Everything was stacked in its favour: sheer pace, the ability to go a lap longer on fuel than the opposition (albeit still three laps shy of the stints it could pull last year), and faster refuelling times. But, the ghost of past failures, in particular the spectacular, last-minute heartbreak of 2016, still loomed large.

That's what made Toyota's victory last weekend all the more special. It was the culmination of six years of painstaking effort since the current LMP1 programme was launched, and few would argue the long-awaited first victory wasn't deserved.

After all, the two TS050 HYBRIDs ran virtually faultlessly all race, the only real scare coming when Kamui Kobayashi forgot to pit the #7 car in the 23rd hour and had to do half a lap on electric power to get back to the pits.

To Toyota's credit, it allowed its two cars to go at it for the victory, despite everything that was at stake, almost to the flag, with the two-lap margin between them at the end of the race not a fair reflection of just how nip-and-tuck it was for almost the entire distance.

It wasn't like Toyota was just cruising, either. The winning #8 car completed 388 laps, the fifth-most in Le Mans history, and only nine tours shy of the record established by Audi in 2010. With perhaps just one less safety car period, Toyota might have been able to bag that particular honour, too, one the team had spoken about gunning for in the absence of factory LMP1 competition.

All in all, then, a job well done - and few would begrudge Toyota its success. And yet, there is still one thing that rankles, which is the widely-held notion that Toyota finally 'beat Le Mans'.

Since last year's race, when it was becoming increasingly apparent Porsche was likely to pull the plug on its LMP1 programme, we knew Toyota would be the last manufacturer standing in the top division. Le Mans 2018 would therefore be its race to lose.

Efforts were made to bolster the privateer field, and a 10-car LMP1 grid for the 2018/19 WEC superseason certainly surpassed this writer's expectations. Heading to the 'prologue' at Paul Ricard, there was a genuine sense of anticipation: could a privateer really mount a credible challenge?

Even during practice for the season opener at Spa, after Toyota thrashed the privateers in testing (albeit running outside the permitted equivalence of technology), Rebellion driver Andre Lotterer was still hopeful the superseason wouldn't be a "one-man (or team) show". But it was a forlorn dream.

In fairness, Toyota's two-lap margin of victory at Spa was not entirely unexpected. With the exception of ByKolles, all the LMP1 privateer cars were making their race debuts, and drivers were left to more or less guess how much fuel to use to avoid penalties for exceeding their allocation. Toyota's hybrid boost was also a major help in negotiating lapped traffic.

It seems Toyota was guilty of severely overestimating the strength of its opposition

After that race, Pascal Vasselon and Rob Leupen, technical director and team director respectively at Toyota, expressed their surprise that the privateers didn't push them harder. At Le Mans, they assured, things would be different, because Toyota's cars wouldn't have as much hybrid boost to play with per kilometre around one lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe as they did at Spa.

It seems Toyota was guilty of severely overestimating the strength of its opposition. The hybrid boost was even more of a help at Le Mans than it was at Spa, what with a pack of 20 LMP2 cars to negotiate, some of which had a better top speed than the Rebellions to the tune of nearly 10km/h at La Sarthe.

To paraphrase SMP Racing's star signing Jenson Button, Le Mans "probably came six months too soon" for all the privateer LMP1 runners. Rebellion, by far the most credible threat to Toyota, suffered a litany of issues with both its cars during the race, starting with Andre Lotterer's nose not being attached properly and then duly parting company with the rest of the #1 R-13-Gibson come the Dunlop chicane on lap one.

Both cars then had to come into the garage to replace clutch sensors, the #3 car suffered its plank coming away and the #1 car had to pit to repair its floor. The final blow for the #1 squad in the fight for third was the door coming loose, which forced Neel Jani to finish the race with an epic sextuple-stint, as well as a pair of penalties for exceeding the mandated 10-lap stint limit for the non-hybrids.

The result? The winning Toyota finished 12 and 13 laps up on the two Rebellion cars respectively, the biggest margin the victorious team at Le Mans has enjoyed over its nearest competitor since the winning Audi came home 28 laps clear of the fourth-placed ORECA in 2010.

No matter what it might claim, the lack of real opposition does detract from Toyota's achievement. From the moment Porsche quit, it had the luxury of being able to pour all its resources into making its cars "bulletproof", to quote Kazuki Nakajima, and for training its crew up to deal with every possible eventuality. It didn't need to invest anything, as it did in years gone by, in making the car go faster.

Even if the privateers had been better prepared, the rules still mandated half a second per lap advantage for the Toyotas, on top of the extra lap of fuel and faster refuelling.

With all those things added up over the course of 24 hours, that's a minimum of 10 minutes, or three laps, in hand for the Toyotas before the race had begun, without factoring in the fact the privateers were losing anything up to 10s a lap getting past backmarkers.

Quite simply, Toyota could only lose if it, as it has often said, 'beat itself'. But given the sheer levels of preparation it enjoyed, the chances of a genuine mechanical gremlin were extremely low. Driver error - or a lapse in concentration, like Kobayashi's - was the only thing that was ever going to realistically deny it.

That's why the belief that 'Toyota beat Le Mans' grates. Had there been no factory opposition in 1994, '99, 2014 or '16, it would have romped home. But on each of those occasions it was denied because it had a worthy opponent breathing down its neck and able to take advantage when things went wrong, which just was not the case in '18.

Even if it was not a classic, the 86th running will at least be fondly remembered by some for being the year Toyota broke its duck as well as the occasion Fernando Alonso got a step closer to the coveted 'Triple Crown' of motorsport. But what about 2019?

Given that next year's race is part of the same superseason, the entry list is likely to be very similar. The only potential difference among the LMP1 ranks is the prospect of a possible second ByKolles entry, or if Toyota decided to enter an extra car - but why would it?

Let's hope the powers that be heed Lotterer's words and "wake up"

The privateers will be better prepared, with five races and many more test sessions ahead to improve their packages, iron out the reliability issues that held them back this year, and so on. But, unless there's a dramatic change in the rules, they will still face that three-lap handicap from the very start. Another Toyota one-two would be a near-certainty.

Let's hope the powers that be heed Lotterer's words and "wake up" to the fact that the non-hybrids need more help from the rulemakers to at least get close enough to be in a position to pick up the pieces if things go wrong for the Toyotas.

Perhaps now Toyota has the prize that has eluded it for so long, it will be more receptive to calls for change. We can only hope so, for if there are no major changes on the horizon, we could be, to quote Lotterer, in for a "super-boring superseason".