How the "small things" cost another overdue win at Le Mans

Another Le Mans 24 Hours and another Toyota victory in the face of no manufacturer opposition. Yet the 88th edition of the great race was different from the previous two in which the Japanese manufacturer triumphed, and not just because there weren't any spectators at the rescheduled event.

The pair of Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs were swung into their pitboxes for repairs over the course of a race that didn't provide the flat-out internecine battle of 2018 or 2019, two Le Mans in which they didn't see the inside of the garage. One thing was the same as in 2019, however: the quicker of the two cars didn't win.

Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima notched up their own hat-tricks to go with Toyota's trophy-keeping three in a row, while Brendon Hartley, the replacement for Fernando Alonso alongside them, added to his 2017 triumph with Porsche. Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez, meanwhile, were left wondering what they have to do to win the double-points round of the World Endurance Championship.

The #7 drivers had victory ripped from their clutches 15 months ago with an hour left of a race in which they'd held a decisive margin over the sister car throughout. This time it was less clear cut, but they were quicker than their team-mates.

Last weekend's race was what might be described as an old-fashioned Le Mans, one that was decided by which car spent the least time in the pits. That honour and therefore the victory laurels went to Buemi, Nakajima and Hartley as Toyota wrapped up the WEC manufacturers' title.

They were the first to hit problems with a braking issue that started to rear its head during the opening stint from Buemi after the 2:30pm start. There was a puncture for the #8 Toyota during the Swiss driver's second stint, which handed a clear initiative to the pole-winning sister car started by Conway after just 14 laps.

Two goes at fixing the brake issue, caused by debris accumulating in the cooling shroud, during routine stops weren't entirely successful. When that debris subsequently caught fire, the Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe squad had no option but to bring the car into its box to replace the cooling assembly in the seventh hour.

Ten minutes disappeared, but because the repair took place under the one of the four safety cars to interrupt this race, Kobayashi only lost second position to the chasing Rebellion Racing privateer LMP1 entry shared by Bruno Senna, Gustavo Menezes and Norman Nato for a single lap.

The pendulum of fortune swung the other way shortly after the halfway mark, and dramatically so: the delay for the #7 Toyota was far more significant. A drop in power was traced to a holed exhaust, which required the replacement of both the failed component and the accompanying turbocharger.

A total of 29 minutes were lost while the car was stationary in its pit. The car fell six laps off the lead and behind both the Rebellion-Gibson R-13s.

"I'm running out of words to talk about the #7 drivers, because once again they've done a very good job during qualifying and during the race. They were clearly a bit faster and again something happened that is not in their control" Pascal Vasselon

There was no way back for Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez, their efforts to make up time hindered by damage to the floor caused when the Briton ran over some debris in his final spell at the wheel. They made it back only as far as third after Louis Deletraz went off at Indianapolis in Rebellion's second-string car late in the 23rd hour. The lead R-13 was still a lap ahead at the conclusion of the 24 hours, and the winning Toyota another five laps further up the road.

The Le Mans gods had turned against the drivers of #7 once again. Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez were the faster of the Toyota crews, not dramatically but they had the narrowest of edges before their performance dropped off over the final third of the race. The averages show they enjoyed a two-tenth margin over the sister car over the fastest 50 laps.

"The two cars were extremely close, but #7 was slightly faster," said TGRE technical director Pascal Vasselon. "I'm running out of words to talk about the #7 drivers, because once again they've done a very good job during qualifying and during the race. They were clearly a bit faster and again something happened that is not in their control."

Last year it was an incorrectly-wired tyre pressure monitor system that resulted in the wrong wheel being changed when Lopez sustained a puncture late in hour 23.

Two years before that, when Kobayashi and Conway were sharing with Stephane Sarrazin, the Japanese was waved through a red light at the end of the pitlane by another driver, looking for all the world like a marshal in his orange overalls. The clutch was burnt out in the confusion as Kobayashi jumped on the brakes and then tried to get going again.

Vasselon described the exhaust issue as a "quality problem". That was of no consolation to the drivers of the #7 car. Conway reckoned yet another Le Mans loss is "going to take some time to get over".

"Another tight one got away: I'm just gutted that we couldn't do it this time," said Conway, who also saw the championship lead he held with his team-mates prior to Le Mans disappear ahead of the Bahrain finale in November. "We've taken two big hits today, one losing the race and one losing the lead in the championship.

"It was up and down today between the two Toyotas, but I think we were generally the quicker car. But it wasn't to be. It's always small things that cost us the win."

Buemi wasn't so sure that #7 would have won this one in a straight fight, something the Toyota drivers had been relishing in the absence of the success handicaps that have made the 2019/20 WEC such a weird affair.

"Against Mike I felt I was potentially a little bit quicker," said Buemi, who did make some inroads into the deficit to the leader after his puncture and again when he climbed back into the car late in the ninth hour. "But the balance between the two cars was changing all the time. I'd say it was pretty even, not like last year when they were faster than us. They were in clearly in a different league."

Toyota, running the latest high-nose version of the TS050, was in a different league to Rebellion this time around. The Swiss entrant wasn't in the game in what is likely to have been its last race after more than a decade at or near the top of the privateer tree in LMP1 - minus one year in the LMP2 ranks when it won the title.

The lead Rebellion-Gibson R-13 got in among the Toyotas in the new Hyperpole qualifying procedure and mounted a fleeting challenge in the opening stint. Thereafter, it was falling back from the Toyotas all the time and was a lap down inside five hours.

Rebellion might not have mounted any kind of challenge to Toyota, which to be fair it had predicted, but it was still a happy team at the end of the race. Second place was, after all, its best Le Mans result and its eighth top-six finish since entering P1 in 2008

That Senna, Menezes and Nato finished between the TS050s in second place owed everything to a rare display of fragility from the Japanese cars.

The ORECA-built and run Rebellions didn't match the performance of the best of its two cars in last year's race. Menezes, Thomas Laurent and Nathanael Berthon were faster on the averages than the winning Toyota, though not the one that should have triumphed, in 2019. This time the #1 R-13 was more than a second and a half away from the TS050s.

Exactly why the gap to the Toyotas increased this time around isn't entirely clear, especially when the Equivalence of Technology has been tweaked in favour of the privateers. The R-13, hastily conceived out of the ORECA 07 LMP2 car for the 2018/19 WEC superseason, has always been a finicky machine from which the maximum potential is difficult to exploit.

"The tyres were doing something weird," said Senna. "We struggled to keep temperature in the fronts, but the rears were overheating."

The Rebellion looked strong in the opening exchanges, Senna setting fastest lap of the race on lap four. His second stint on the same set of Michelins wasn't so strong: Senna was 51s down on race leader Conway when the next round of stops began.

"The car felt good at the beginning of the race, but then it got bad," he explained. "The track grip went away and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it was GT cars going off and bringing muck back on."

Circuit conditions weren't as good this year as last, possibly as the result of overnight rain, and that, according to Senna, "for sure hurt us more than Toyota". The R-13 has always struggled more than its rivals when the grip ebbs away, witness its disastrous performance in the wet in August's Spa round of the WEC.

Rebellion might not have mounted any kind of challenge to Toyota, which to be fair it had predicted, but it was still a happy team at the end of the race. Second place was, after all, its best Le Mans result and its eighth top-six finish since entering P1 in 2008.

"We're second at Le Mans, pretty cool right?" Senna said. "It is a good achievement. We didn't have a car to fight for the win, but we did have a reliable car."

The only delay of any note for the #1 Rebellion came in the 20th hour when the team needed to attend to a broken mounting point on the nose, which dropped it behind the sister car driven by Deletraz, Berthon and Romain Dumas. Menezes was already back up to second when the car had its late off.

The #3 Rebellion, racing in the WEC for the first time since the Silverstone series opener more than a year ago, wasn't as quick as the lead car and also had more problems. It needed a new nose after a rabbit strike and also had a malfunctioning clutch for much of the race.

There was no fairytale farewell for the ByKolles team's ENSO CLM P1/01, an LMP1 design that has been racing in the WEC with various engines in the back since 2014. The current Gibson-engined car that had outshone the solo Rebellion for at least the first half of the Spa WEC round in August wasn't nearly as competitive over 24 hours at Le Mans.

ByKolles will be back next year with a new Le Mans Hypercar hoping for better luck. Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez will also be wishing for a change in fortunes after yet another punch in the guts

Tom Dillmann was firmly rooted to the foot the class times in the new Hyperpole session. The Frenchman, who shared the car with newcomer Bruno Spengler and team regular Oliver Webb, quickly fell away from the rest of the LMP1 field.

It was delayed as early as the third hour when its alternator stopped charging. The team changed the malfunctioning item with the loss of 20 minutes, only to find that the problem was merely a loose connection.

Spengler subsequently went off down the hill into the Esses when the rear wing failed in hour seven. The Canadian got the car back to the pits and the car was repaired, only for the team to decide not to return to the track.

"It was all prepped and ready to go back out, but because we couldn't retrieve the original wing it wasn't possible to identify what the problem was," explained Webb. "It was a shame because we really wanted to finish Le Mans for the first time with the car. That was our target and we were just doing our own race."

ByKolles will be back next year with a new Le Mans Hypercar hoping for better luck. Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez will also be wishing for a change in fortunes after yet another punch in the guts.

"I'm extremely sorry, all the team is sorry; the drivers of #7 always perform but very often they hit problems," said Vasselon. "I think next year we are going to swap the numbers."