The most heartbreaking defeat of the last decade

Finally, the perennial unlucky loser was really about to do it. All those years of disappointment were about to be buried once and for all. Toyota was going to win the Le Mans 24 Hours. Toyota had won the Le Mans 24 Hours. As good as.

But as good as has never been enough at Le Mans, certainly not for Toyota down the years.

A manufacturer that had made a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory did it again in 2016. This time it was later than ever in its danger zone of the metaphorical eleventh hour.

The sight of Kazuki Nakajima running at reduced speed on the Mulsanne Straight with just six minutes left on the clock at Le Mans that year will stay with me forever. No image from the past decade is etched so indelibly into my memory.

That warm sensation of shock swept down my body at those images of the slowing Toyota TS050 HYBRID.

I didn't have money on Nakajima, Sebastien Buemi and Anthony Davidson, nor did I start the race wanting them to win, or anyone else for that matter. Human empathy just got the better of me.

At 2.54pm on June 19 2016, how could anyone at Le Mans or watching on TV around the world not feel Toyota's pain? It wasn't just that team and drivers had done the job and, to all intents and purposes, beaten Porsche and Audi. There was also the Japanese marque's backstory at the Circuit de la Sarthe to consider.

I have witnessed three distinct periods of Toyota's Le Mans history in my time reporting on the big race and each one had encompassed a near-miss, sometimes two.

The images of the #5 Toyota slowing down are gut-wrenching to this day

But this one trumped them all for sheer drama, courtesy of its timing and the sad sight of Nakajima parked on the track adjacent to his pit garage as Neel Jani passed by aboard the Porsche 919 Hybrid that claimed a dramatic victory.

Yet we all know that empathy for one's fellow man is trumped by tribal loyalty at such times.

Looking back on that day, I don't have any doubt that there were scores of Porsche fans massed in the grandstands opposite the pits who felt no sympathy whatsoever for Toyota or Nakajima and his team-mates.

I should have realised that. Thinking back to the occasion of my very first Le Mans in 1990, I remember the cheers of the baying pack of Jaguar fans as the second-place Brun Porsche ground to a halt in a cloud of smoke with just 15 minutes of the race to go.

The sight of Jesus Pareja walking from the smouldering machine and collapsing into the arms of his crew at the old signalling pits at Mulsanne Corner brought a lump to my throat.

It was the end of a plucky performance from the Spaniard and team boss Walter Brun after Oscar Larrauri, the lead driver in their Porsche 962C, had to stand down after a couple of stints following a massive shunt in the Renault 21 Europa Cup support event on race-day morning.

For all our obsession with the underdog in Britain, it meant nothing in comparison with the prospect of a Jaguar 1-2. I should have realised that not everyone was going to feel the same way as me in 1990, nor more than a quarter of a century later in 2016.

But then there are a lot of things that I appear to need to re-learn every year at Le Mans. You might have thought that after so long I would have become immune to the cruelty of the place.

I don't like the cliche about Le Mans choosing its winner, but it seemed particularly apt that weekend. And I still find the images of the #5 Toyota slowing down gut-wrenching to this day.