How Toyota rendered its Le Mans agony a distant memory

The word ‘Toyota’ written large across the nose of the two cars wasn’t necessarily what it seemed. The presence of the Japanese manufacturer’s name on two Group C machines at Fuji nearly 40 years ago didn’t identify the design so much as offer a pointer to the future. It turned out to be a long and winding future, littered with false dawns and heartbreak. Eventually, though, the marque would find plentiful success at the greatest sportscar race of them all. 

The Fuji 1000Km round of the World Endurance Championship in October 1983 was ground zero in the story of Toyota’s bid for glory at the Le Mans 24 Hours. No one could have predicted that it would take 35 years for the marque to bag the biggest prize in sportscar racing, or that its maiden victory in 2018 would be the first of five in a row.

It’s a streak that Toyota will try to extend with its GR010 HYBRID in the centenary edition of the French enduro this June against Ferrari, Porsche et al in the Hypercar class. It’s also a chance to validate those wins: victories one to five were scored in the face of limited opposition.

The Toyota-powered car that made its debut on the world stage at Fuji 1983 is correctly called a TOM’S-Toyota 83C. It was the start of an ultimately successful endeavour, initiated as the new Group C fuel formula was blooming into flower, to persuade the marque to go to Le Mans.

The 83C was the brainchild of two big players in the world of Japanese motorsport. Good friends Nobuhide Tachi and Minoru Hayashi, respective bosses of the TOM’S race team and constructor Dome, were, says the former, “pushing for the dream of Le Mans”. They knew they had to prove themselves first before Toyota would commit to backing such a venture.

The duo’s dream became a reality step by step. By 1985, the TOM’S/Dome project had made it to Le Mans with an evolution of their original Group C car. The two-car campaign at the Circuit de la Sarthe was still a privateer effort, though with increasing technical support from Toyota. The pair of 85Cs, one entered by TOM’S and one by Dome, didn’t distinguish themselves in qualifying, although the former made it to the finish a distant 12th. Tachi calls it “the turning point for Toyota’s Group C involvement”. 

Fuji 1983: Matsumoto, Hoshino, Sekiya campaign the TOM'S-Toyota that was intended to convince the marque to enter Le Mans

Photo by: Sutton Images

Two years later, the name above the door at Le Mans was Toyota Team TOM’S. The TOM’S/Dome project was now officially backed by the factory. And by 1989 that allowed for a full campaign in what had become the World Sports-Prototype Championship, with a new carbon-composite design that had come on stream in 1988.

Toyota still didn’t become a fixture at Le Mans. Not quite. There have been three distinct chapters to its story since, and that’s not counting the two years in which the marque kept a foot in the door with modified Japanese GT series machinery. Each stanza in the narrative has its own tale – or tales – of disappointment.

Toyota might have been a multiple Le Mans winner even before the turn of the new millennium, and that number should have increased over the early years of the current programme that started with the TS030 HYBRID LMP1 on the rebirth of the WEC in 2012. It somehow contrived to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory more than once. As Pascal Vasselon, technical director of Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe, once joked, “we’re good at finding new ways of losing victory at Le Mans”.

Krosnoff jumped from the cockpit, ran to the back of the car, fiddled with the gear linkage and somehow engaged a cog. Any chance of victory disappeared with the stop for permanent repairs that followed

The carbon car, from 1989 powered by a twin-turbo V8, never looked like a winner at Le Mans, or in the WSPC. But its successor, the TS010 built to the new 3.5-litre Group C formula, did win in the world championship and took a second place on its Le Mans debut in 1992, albeit six laps down on the winning Peugeot. Toyota stalwart Geoff Lees describes the TS010 as “the best-handling car I ever drove”.

What that car lacked compared to the Peugeot were a few horsepower and a reliable gearbox. A beefed-up linkage introduced for Le Mans 1993 only exacerbated its transmission problems. All three of the TOM’S-run TS010s that year required a change of transmission as Peugeot swept to a 1-2-3. 

The potential of the TS010 remained unfulfilled with the death of the world championship and then Group C. Yet Toyota almost prevailed at a hotchpotch of a Le Mans in 1994 with a machine that had its roots in the car introduced in 1988. The ageing fuel-formula design was reworked into the 94C-V to new post-Group C regulations and fielded as an LMP1/C90 car (C90 referred to the generation of old-rules cars accepted). Two were entered, one by SARD and one by Trust. And so to the first of Toyota’s near-misses. 

The SARD entry shared by Jeff Krosnoff, Mauro Martini and Eddie Irvine came within 90 minutes of success. The car had been established in the lead for nine hours when Krosnoff ground to a halt in neutral on the start/finish straight. He jumped from the cockpit, ran to the back of the car, fiddled with the gear linkage and somehow engaged a cog. Any chance of victory disappeared with the stop for permanent repairs that followed, though Irvine fought back to split the Dauer 962LM Porsches and take second.

Martini, Krosnoff and Irvine were unfortunate to miss out on spoils in 1994 with 94C-V

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Toyota would get closer still to victory in the first year of its next concerted push to fulfil the Le Mans dream. The plunge proper was made into the burgeoning GT1 class for 1998 after Toyota had tested the waters with the car known as the Supra GT-LM in 1995-96. It was an all guns blazing, big money attempt to win Le Mans – and Le Mans only.

The project masterminded from the same Cologne facility that Toyota Gazoo Racing calls home today started on 1 January 1997. The result was the Toyota GT-One, a car that was up and running by the end of December under its initial TS020 codename. Just six months later, it came within 80 minutes of Le Mans victory. 

Transmission failure resulted in the late retirement of the car shared by Lees, Thierry Boutsen and Ralf Kelleners. The cause was a lack of oil in the ’box after two changes of the internals. The likelihood is – and there are alternative though not entirely contradictory explanations – that the sump plug on the casing wasn’t replaced at the second stop.

Twelve months later, Toyota lost victory twice over, through no fault of its own. The GT-One had an edge in a battle with BMW and its V12 LMR. Boutsen, Kelleners and Allan McNish were fighting with the German car driven by Tom Kristensen, JJ Lehto and Jorg Muller when Boutsen was punted from behind under braking for the Dunlop Chicane by a GT2-class Porsche in the night.

My favourite car: Vincenzo Sospiri on Toyota GT-One

“We would have won in a straight fight, but I’m sure that Tom would say they would have done the same,” says McNish. “We’ve argued over that one plenty of times.”

With the lead Bimmer out at midday, there was a new Toyota vs BMW battle as the race climaxed. The remaining GT-One shared by Ukyo Katayama, Toshio Suzuki and Keiichi Tsuchiya looked on course to prevail in a battle with the V12 LMR driven by Yannick Dalmas, Pierluigi Martini and Jo Winkelhock. But an incident with an older privateer BMW that put Katayama up on the kerbs on the entry to the first Mulsanne chicane did for Toyota’s chances early in the final hour. 

The GT-One led into Toyota’s Formula 1 entry in 2002; the sportscar was even used to test components and systems for its first F1 car. Then Le Mans came back into focus after the withdrawal from F1. Work on what became the TS030 HYBRID had started even before an entry into the reborn WEC was signed off in Japan. 

Toyota GT-One had the pace to win in 1998 and 1999, but not the luck

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The TS030 was a WEC race winner in year one of the programme and its successor, the TS040 still powered by a normally aspirated V8, took the drivers’ title with Sebastien Buemi and Anthony Davidson in 2014 and the manufacturers’ title to boot in a season where it won five of the eight races. But Le Mans wasn’t one of them… 

The Toyota shared by Alex Wurz, Stephane Sarrazin and Kazuki Nakajima held a slim but stable advantage in the night when it encountered a problem with an FIA sensor. Nakajima was on his way to the pits to have it replaced, a job that would have taken seconds rather than minutes, when the rogue part’s loom burnt out and stranded him out on track. 

That was nothing compared with the heartbreak of 2016, the first season of the TS050 powered by a new 2.4-litre turbo engine. Buemi, Davidson and Nakajima were just six minutes from victory after prevailing in a thrilling fight with the best of the Porsche 919 Hybrids. Nakajima was a minute up the road when he lost power on his penultimate lap. An air line between a turbo and intercooler fractured, a problem that 12 months later wouldn’t have cost the car victory: some of the systems needed to overcome such an issue weren’t yet in place on the hurriedly developed V6. 

If Toyota’s 2016 failure might be described as frustrating, senseless would be the correct description of what happened a year later. The car Kamui Kobayashi shared with Sarrazin and Mike Conway was in the lead battle when he ran a red light at the end of the pitlane. He’d been waved through by an orange-suited figure who turned out to be another driver rather than a marshal. In the confusion, the Japanese driver stopped and tried to get going using the conventional clutch rather than on electrical power as per a normal pitstop. It wasn’t designed for the job, and Kobayashi wouldn’t complete the lap. 

Alonso made it two wins from two starts the following year thanks to another bizarre incident that could seemingly only afflict a Toyota

The long-awaited victory at Le Mans for Toyota finally came in 2018, in the first of two editions of the 24 Hours on the 2018-19 WEC schedule. The so-called superseason was a reaction to the end of Porsche’s LMP1 programme the previous year, which had followed Audi’s departure one year earlier. Toyota was now racing alone as the only manufacturer in LMP1 – its opposition came from garagistes only – but it put on a show in a closely fought and flat-out race. No quarter was given in the battle between the winning TS050 shared by Fernando Alonso, Buemi and Nakajima, and that of team-mates Kobayashi, Conway and Jose Maria Lopez. 

The Japanese manufacturer has continued to rack up the victories against limited opposition in the years since Alonso inevitably stole the headlines from Toyota on the occasion of its maiden victory. The Spaniard made it two wins from two starts the following year thanks to another bizarre incident that could seemingly only afflict a Toyota. 

Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez should have buried their Le Mans hoodoo, and had more than enough in hand over the sister car to complete a pitstop to replace a holed Michelin as the top of the 23rd hour approached. The problem was that the team changed the wrong wheel because the system of tyre pressure monitors had been incorrectly wired. The slow lap that followed for Lopez before he had to stop again handed the win to the sister car. 

Toyota's Le Mans defeat in 2016 was perhaps the most gut-wrenching in event history

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Kobayashi, Conway and Lopez finally broke their jinx in 2021, the first year of the Le Mans Hypercar category, though there was a problem unseen by the outside world that threatened to derail both their victory bid and Toyota’s attempt to give its new GR010 HYBRID a debut win. The fuel bladders on the two cars were collapsing due to insufficient breathing, and the polyurethane particles released as a result were combining with grease from the refuelling nozzle to block the filter. Toyota only secured another 1-2 victory ahead of the solo Alpine, a low-key manufacturer entry with an old ‘grandfathered’ LMP1 car, courtesy of a series of ingenious fixes thought up on the hoof.

That’s among the reasons why Toyota doesn’t like the suggestion that it’s had it easy over the past five years. For a start, Vasselon is sure that the TS050s wouldn’t have been beaten in 2018 had Porsche continued its 919 Hybrid programme. 

“Our pace in 2018 and having a race without any issues would have meant that we would have won against any of the opposition we’d had in the past,” he says. “This kind of achievement has a value, an absolute value.”

He also suggests that the level of risk-taking by the drivers is higher when two crews from the same team are fighting: “The driver can’t say he is battling with a faster car; there are no excuses. If Porsche or Ferrari had been present, our drivers wouldn’t have been taking more risks. Absolutely not.”

Vasselon concedes that the image of Toyota’s five wins on the trot in the wider world is different to his own. 

“What we have achieved hasn’t been easy,” he argues, “but if you race against Porsche, Ferrari, Cadillac and Peugeot and get it right, the achievement will have another magnitude in terms of how it is perceived. We understand that what happens in the coming months and years will count more than the recent past.”

That’s why Buemi is so keen to add to his tally of four Le Mans victories come the second weekend of June this year. 

“We know how good we have been and how difficult those victories were, even if some people think we had it easy,” says the Swiss. “I know how hard I’ve had to fight for the victories – I gave it everything each time. A victory this year means there can be no discussion.”

Buemi has tasted Le Mans glory four times with Toyota and is eager for more this year

Photo by: Nikolaz Godet