The fresh threats and new rivals to Toyota's WEC domination

You’ll find the odd person at Toyota who’ll stand in front of you and tell you with a straight face that the Japanese manufacturer isn’t favourite going into this year’s World Endurance Championship. Most, however, happily concede that a marque that swept to a fifth straight drivers’ and manufacturers’ title double last year has, in reigning champion Brendon Hartley’s words, “a target on its back”.

That’s still the case, he and team-mate Sebastien Buemi admit, even after the events of Monday and Tuesday’s official pre-season Prologue test at the start of race week for the Qatar 1812km that kicks off the 2024 campaign. The statistics remain unchanged, they point out.

“It’s hard to deny that if you have won six out of seven races one year, you have to be the favourite the next,” says Buemi, who together with Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa retained the title they won in 2022 in the second season of the Hypercar era. “Okay we didn’t win the biggest race, the Le Mans 24 Hours, but we have to acknowledge that we are the team to beat.”

What they are not saying is that they are favourite for race honours in Saturday’s season-opener around the Losail International Circuit. The results of the Prologue have ensured that cannot be the case. The Toyota GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar wasn’t on the pace, or even near to it. The best of the Japanese cars, the sister #7 car with Nyck de Vries at the wheel, languished down in 13th place in the combined times, well over a second behind the fastest manufacturers.

The events of this weekend probably won’t offer much of an insight into what is to come over the remainder of the WEC, which has returned to eight races for this season. That’s certainly Hartley’s hope. He describes the 3.37-mile Losail venue as an “outlier”, a track that “is not well suited to our car” or just plain “pretty bad for us”.

But whatever happens in the Middle East this weekend when, according to Hartley, Toyota’s weekend will be “all about damage limitation”, the team is not going to pitch up at Imola for round two in April and return to its ultra-dominant position of 2023. The pack was closing on the GR010s through last season and by the very nature of the Hypercar class that process will have continued over the winter. As Buemi says, “everything changes for the new season”.

That includes the level of the competition faced by Toyota, and not just because three new major manufacturers have arrived in the form of BMW, Alpine and Lamborghini in the second season of the WEC since the introduction of LMDh machinery. (The other newcomer is garagiste Isotta Fraschini with its Tipo 6 LMH Competizione.) Just as significant, probably more so, is that the new manufacturers in 2023, Ferrari, Porsche and Cadillac, now have a year’s experience - with their machinery and as teams - under their belts. And then there’s Peugeot, which is returning for its second full WEC campaign with a major overhaul of its out-there 9X8, which will come on stream at round two at Imola in April.

Toyota knows it has a target on its back for the 2024 WEC campaign

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

That’s not to forget some subtle changes to the WEC when it kicks off in Qatar this weekend, one of two new venues on the calendar together with Imola and one of four along with Interlagos and Austin being visited for the first time since the introduction of the Hypercar class. The LMP2 division has been banished to WEC co-organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest’s feeder series with the exception of Le Mans and now there are 18 GT cars out on track in the new LMGT3 class. If the cars are not much slower than the GTE’s they have replaced, they will achieve their performance in a slightly different way.

The qualifying format has changed, too. It now mimics the Hyperpole system introduced at Le Mans in 2022, a two-round affair with 10 cars from a first 12-minute session going through to 10 minutes of final qualifying.

Something else that is new is the Balance of Performance, one of the key building blocks of the Hypercar class. A new season, of course, means a new BoP table, but there is also a new system in place.

“So much has changed since last year,” continues Buemi. “No P2s and the new GT3s is going to change the on-track dynamic, and, of course, a new BoP.” His “everything changes comment” is probably bang on the money.

"We had new competitors joining at start of 2023, who were on a steep learning curve and catching up all the time" David Floury, Toyota technical director

The gap is closing

That much was clear at the end of 2023. Toyota might have won the opening three races at a relative canter, but things were closer as the campaign drew to a conclusion as it picked up it winning streak after the defeat at the hands of Ferrari at Le Mans. Porsche led for four of the six hours at Fuji in September and the best of the Penske factory 963 LMDhs might well have split the Toyotas but for an error in the pits before the race had even begun. Then at Bahrain in November, the privateer Jota car was the fastest car in terms of an average over a double stint on a set of Michelin tyres. Put simply, the Toyota’s rivals were catching up.

The expectation should be that this process has continued over the winter and will continue to do so through the eight races on the expanded 2024 calendar. The Prologue suggests that it is very much the case.

LMH and LMDh allow limited scope for development, so the gains that can be made are incremental. Toyota’s advantage last year owed much to the fact that it had a well proven car in its third season of racing that had undergone two off-season updates.

Ferrari is focused on optimising its current 499P car before applying for upgrades

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

The steps it can now make are probably of the pigeon variety: “Our car is pretty much optimised,” says Hartley. Ferrari, Porsche, Cadillac and, of course, Peugeot, have the ability to make more significant strides. That goes for the machinery they are running and as teams organisationally. Toyota has been racing in WEC since its rebirth in 2012, whereas its rivals last year were largely new: the European arms of the Penske Porsche Motorsport and Ganassi-run Cadillac Racing squads both came together in the weeks running up to the Sebring season-opener last March.

“We had new competitors joining at start of 2023, who were on a steep learning curve and catching up all the time,” says David Floury, who has succeeded Pascal Vasselon as technical director of the Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe organisation in Cologne that runs the WEC programme. “Our progression margin is smaller than for our competitors. Our car has been running in WEC since 2021 and we have been in the championship even longer. We have to expect the others to progress quicker than we can, and with a bigger margin.”

The Toyota GR010 is racing in the same form as last year. TGRE didn’t make a request to take up one of the five evo jokers - developments made in the name of performance - available to a manufacturer over the lifespan of an LMH or LMDh. “We couldn’t claim a performance joker with the position we were in last year,” explains Floury. The rule makers, the ACO and the FIA, have to approve jokers and were hardly likely to allow the fastest car to get even faster.

Of its rivals, only Peugeot has so far opted to invoke a joker or jokers - we don’t know how many because the process is not in the public domain. Manufacturers aren’t even told what their rivals have been allowed to do. We don’t know, for example, how many Toyota expended on its two upgrades ahead of the 2021 and 2022 seasons.

Ferrari, Porsche and Cadillac have opted to make the best of what they have before opting for a joker or two. That said Porsche has a major engine revision in the works, though its introduction has now been pushed back beyond Le Mans. The position of each of these three brands is that they need to make the most of what they have before opting for performance updates.

“We want to exploit the potential of the base car: before we apply for any jokers we want to understand the ultimate performance of our car,” says Ferrari sportscar racing technical director Ferdinando Cannizzo of the Italian manufacturer’s 499P LMH. “The more we run the more we understand the car, the aero, the tyres, and definitely the electronics and the controls.”

Ferrari hasn’t ruled out opting for a joker during the course of the season just beginning - mid-season homologation updates are allowed for the moment but are unlikely to be possible in subsequent seasons - but insists that it is not in the plan for the moment.

Fellow second-season runners Cadillac says it is still learning about its V-Series.R

Photo by: Erik Junius

Stephan Mitas, team manager at Cadillac Racing, says the same thing as Cannizzo but in a different way when talking about the V-Series.R LMDh: “There is still a lot to be learned with the package as it stands. If we do take the opportunity to use a joker and rehomologate the vehicle, we want to do it in the best possible fashion.”

Porsche points out that its priority since last year has been improving reliability of its 963 LMDh and then, says PPM boss Jonathan Diuguid, “we can focus on performance and look at evo jokers to get us to where we need to be in the future”.

The natural order should see a concertinaing of the field, at least of those manufacturers involved last year. How those that are new to the WEC fit in is a big unknown, though they have the biggest gains to make through the season. BMW, of course, has a proven car, not in the WEC but over in North America where the Rahal team has been racing the M Hybrid V8 LMDh in the IMSA SportsCar Championship for a year now.

What effect will the BoP have?

The BoP, or rather a BoP, was published last week. How long it remains in force isn’t known right now. An explanation of the system in force for 2024 has yet to be given - a media briefing to that effect is scheduled for today (Thursday). But it can be said with some certainty that the FIA and the ACO have backed away from an intent to introduce what they were billing at the end of last year as a simplified system.

"In 2023 we turned up at Sebring and Ferrari gave us a bit of wiggly tooth when it took pole, but we fought back well. Now there are other manufacturers who are more established and everyone is going to be fighting us harder" Brendon Hartley

It appears that the BoP will be more reactive with scope for more changes than in 2023. It is believed that there is no set timeline, no flags in the sand this season: the outgoing system allowed for just one set of wholesale changes after Le Mans and two so-called platform changes - an adjustment to the balance between LMH and LMDh machinery - after the first two races and again after a further two races post-Le Mans. That plan, of course, was overridden by the powers that be pre-Le Mans.

A further tweak is in the pipeline. The organisers are looking to level up the performance profiles of the cars in terms of acceleration and ultimate straightline speed. There is provision for what is dubbed a power gain after the cars reach 210km/h (130mph) - a percentage increase or decrease to the maximum power listed for each car in the BoP. The idea was trialled, at least by some Hypercar teams, during this week’s official pre-season Prologue test in Qatar with view to a possible introduction at Imola.

The BoP as it stands has hit Toyota, but also Ferrari and, the biggest loser, Porsche. The GR010 is both heavier and less powerful than during the final leg of the 2023 season. Its minimum weight has been set at 1089kg, an increase of nine kilogrammes, which has resulted in one hard fact we do know about the BoP. The maximum weight allowed has been increased from 1080 to 1100kg, which isn’t an issue for Toyota. The class minimum for LMH when the GR010 was being designed was 1100kg before its reduction to 1040kg for four-wheel-drive cars as part of the convergence process with LMDh.

Porsche was hurt the most by the most recent BoP changes

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

LMDh is now the dominant ruleset in Hypercar with the arrival of Lamborghini, Alpine and BMW. The political landscape has shifted: last year there were three OEMs with LMHs and two with LMDhs. Now there are five LMDh manufacturers to rattle the rulemakers’ cage.

Rob Leupen, Toyota’s race director, insists this is an irrelevance. “I saw enough politics last year and I am confident that we have all learnt from the past,” he says. “I believe that politics will not play a big role in the BoP and that the rules will be enforced as they should be.”

What will Qatar tell us?

Possibly not a lot. Hartley hit the nail on the head when he described the venue rebuilt for last year as an “outlier”. The new surface that Toyota, Ferrari and the Penske and Jota teams experienced during a test in late November is ultra smooth - it has been described as “low energy” - resulting in relatively low degradation. What it does cause is graining, the problem that really hurt Toyota during the Prologue.

The tyre allocation for the Qatar 1812km - a race that will be chequered flagged after 10 hours if that figure, a nod to the year of inauguration of the Qatari state, has not been reached - is eight sets for the race. That compares with four and a half sets for a regular six-hour WEC event, so it is slightly more generous. That means if Toyota still has the defining advantage it enjoyed in 2023, pace over a double stint, it is likely to be less of a factor this weekend than in subsequent races.

But what can be said is that the GR010’s advantage in 2024 will diminished. Toyota certainly believes so.

“I don’t think we are as much a favourite as we were last year,” says Hartley. “In 2023 we turned up at Sebring and Ferrari gave us a bit of wiggly tooth when it took pole, but we fought back well. Now there are other manufacturers who are more established and everyone is going to be fighting us harder. The championship is anyone’s to take.”

With plenty of new rivals on the 2024 WEC grid, who can take down Toyota's dominance?

Photo by: Shameem Fahath