Toyota hits the ton — charting 100 world championship sportscar starts

Toyota is celebrating its 100th world championship prototype start in this weekend's Portimao 8 Hours round of the World Endurance Championship with its new Le Mans Hypercar. The story stretches back nearly 40 years to a low-key entry into the Group C arena and straddles multiple eras of sportscar history and different rulesets.

There have been cars run out of Japan, Britain and Germany and any number of engine configurations, from a four-cylinder 2.1-litre turbo four through a 1000bhp V8, and a screaming 3.5-litre V10 and onto the hybrid powerplants with which Toyota has competed in the current iteration of the world series since 2012. 

There have been successes and failures along the way, not least at the Le Mans 24 Hours. But as the marque reaches this significant milestone it now has a total of 31 race victories — including a hat-trick at Le Mans — and 78 podiums to its name. 

The first step

Masanori Sekiya, Keiji Matsumoto, Kaoru Hoshino TOM'S-Toyota 83C, Fuji 1983

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No one quite knew the significance of the presence of two Japanese-built Group C prototypes, both with Toyota writ large across their noses, on the entry when the World Endurance Championship pitched up at Fuji in October 1983. The European press corps lamented the lack of straight answers about the aspirations of the Japanese manufacturer, though our own Quentin Spurring offered some informed speculation when he suggested it was "planning a long-term involvement" in a category then in its second season.

Autosport was only half correct. It wasn't so much Toyota that had the Group C dream as the prime movers in the project behind the entries at Fuji. One was Nobuhide Tachi, boss of the TOM'S race team, the other Minoru Hayashi, his opposite number at racing car constructor Dome. The two good friends were, says Tachi, "pushing for the dream of Le Mans".

The eight-valve four-cylinder turbo had its roots in a rally powerplant, but the 2.1-litre engine had already seen service in another joint TOM'S/Dome project with a Celica Group 5 silhouette racer

Long-time TOM'S employee Susumu Koumi takes up the story: "Mr Tachi's policy was that if you wanted the backing of a manufacturer you had to prove yourself first. So that's what we did."

There was, initially, only limited backing for the project from Toyota, whose engine powered a car designed and developed by Dome but was correctly known as the TOM'S-Toyota 83C. The eight-valve four-cylinder turbo had its roots in a rally powerplant, but the 2.1-litre engine had already seen service in another joint TOM'S/Dome project with a Celica Group 5 silhouette racer.

Fuji 1983 turned out to a mixed world championship debut for the 'Toyota' prototype, which had already raced in the All-Japan Endurance Championship. One of the two TOM'S 83Cs, entered by ex-Formula 2 racer Tetsu Ikuzawa, didn't even make the race after a major fire resulting from a fractured fuel line rendered the car hors combat during unofficial practice on the Thursday of race week.

The car entered by TOM'S itself, driven by future Le Mans winner Masanori Sekiya, Keiji Matsumoto and Kaoru Hoshino, ran as high as fourth. A tyre blow-out for Matsumoto late on in the event triggered a race-ending red flag, but the car was still classified a respectable ninth.

A dream fulfilled 

Kaoru Hoshino, Masanori Sekiya, Satoru Nakajima TOM'S-Toyota 85C, Le Mans 1985

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TOM'S, Dome — and Toyota — made it to Le Mans in 1985 with a further evolution of the 83C design, now known as the 85C. It was a turning point in the history of the Japanese manufacturer's involvement in the prototype ranks.

This was still very much a privateer project with only limited backing, but had ever-increasing technical assistance from Toyota. The two cars — one entered by TOM'S, the other by Dome — qualified only 22nd and 29th after abandoning the long-tail bodywork developed specifically for the Circuit de la Sarthe during qualifying, but the TOM'S car shared by Sekiya, Hoshino and Satoru Nakajima, father of current Toyota racer Kazuki, made it home in 12th position after a reliable run.

Tachi calls it "the turning point for Toyota's Group C involvement". Susumu agrees: "Everyone had been telling us that taking that four-cylinder engine to Le Mans was like suicide, but we got to the finish and that kind of dragged Toyota into the project."

Factory backing

Alan Jones, Eje Elgh, Geoff Lees Toyota 87C, Le Mans 1987

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TOM'S was back at Le Mans for its third attack on the big race in 1987, but with a difference. It was now a fully-fledged factory operation racing under the Toyota Team TOM'S banner. And, significantly, the Dome-built cars were now known as Toyotas.

There was also a growing involvement of a new British-based operation known as TOM'S GB headed by Glenn Waters, who'd initially forged a relationship with the Japanese organisation in Formula 3. He brought in John Wickham, who would later play a crucial role in Bentley's 2003 Le Mans triumph, as team manager that year.

"There was an issue with the calibration of the metre on the refuelling rig. He didn't actually have enough fuel to complete his stint" John Wickham

It wasn't an auspicious Le Mans debut for Toyota as a factory. One of the two 87Cs, now powered by a 16-valve version of the turbo four, didn't even make it to the end of the opening stint. Alan Jones, Formula 1 world champion in 1980, ran out of fuel before his first pitstop.

The official line at the time was that the reserve pump had failed to pick up the last few litres of fuel. Wickham can reveal today that it was actually a mix-up by the team.

"There was an issue with the calibration of the metre on the refuelling rig," he says. "He didn't actually have enough fuel to complete his stint."

The sister car, meanwhile, was out of the race before nightfall with head gasket failure.

A full world championship

Geoff Lees, Johnny Dumfries, John Watson Toyota 89C-V, Le Mans 1989

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Toyota took another step up in 1989 with a full programme in the World Sports-Prototype Championship run out TOM'S GB's premises in Norfolk. It made the step with a new carbon-composite design, the 88C-V commissioned from Dome by Toyota Racing Development, and an all-new twin-turbo V8 initially of 3.2-litre capacity developed in-house at Toyota.

The new package raced during one of the strongest eras of sportscar racing in terms of manufacturer participation, but Toyota never truly got on terms with the likes of Jaguar and Mercedes at the front of the field. Two fourth places were the best results for the 88C-V and the close cousins that followed over the two seasons the design raced in the WSPC. Fuel economy, or rather a lack of it, was the car's bugbear.

"That car was very heavy on the fuel, so we could never run full power," recalls long-time Toyota driver Geoff Lees. "But when we first ran that car, it had 1000bhp or even more, and a lot of torque with it — it used to break driveshafts. It was actually a very reliable engine, but it just didn't have the economy you needed in Group C."

A first world championship victory

Geoff Lees, David Brabham, Ukyo Katayama Toyota TS010, Le Mans 1992

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Toyota really did get serious for the new 3.5-litre Group C rules phased into the world championship in 1990. TOM'S built a new factory in Hingham, Norfolk and recruited former Jaguar designer Tony Southgate to lead the aerodynamic development of what became the TS010 built by TRD. He'd phoned up Waters after his deal to move to Aston Martin had fallen through when it axed its Group C programme in early 1990, and an introduction to Toyota was quickly followed by a job offer.

"The problem was Peugeot had the more powerful engine and better reliability. Gearboxes were always our weak point" Geoff Lees

The new car made a debut at the 1991 Sportscar World Championship finale at Autopolis and then scored Toyota's maiden world championship sportscar victory at the start of a full-season attack the following year. There was an element of luck to the victory at Monza for Lees and Hitoshi Ogawa, as one of the 905s entered by Peugeot retired and the other had an off.

That was as good as it got for the TS010, though it did finish second at Le Mans to Peugeot, albeit with a deficit of six laps to the winning car. The TS010 was arguably more competitive on its second attempt at Le Mans in 1993 after the demise of the world championship, though could finish no better than fourth.
Lees describes the TS010 as the "best-handling car I ever raced".

"It really was fantastic," he recalls. "If I went into the Porsche Curves at Le Mans with a Peugeot behind me, I wouldn't even be able to see it in my mirrors by the time I got to the start-finish straight. The problem was Peugeot had the more powerful engine and better reliability. Gearboxes were always our weak point."

Return from Cologne

Alex Wurz, Nicolas Lapierre Toyota TS030 Hybrid, Interlagos 2012

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Toyota might have been absent from front-line sportscar racing since the GT-One (nee TS020) of 1998-99, frying bigger fish in Formula 1, but it ended up only missing only a couple of world series enduros. The TS010 was on the grid when the original incarnation of the series withered and died at Magny-Cours in October 1992, while the TS030 LMP1 developed like its immediate forebear at Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne made its debut three races into the reborn WEC at Le Mans 2012.

The team ended up contesting the remainder of the season, though that wasn't the original intention. It was planning what Pascal Vasselon, technical director of the TMG organisation that now goes under the name Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe, describes as a "testing year with some races to spice up the development". That changed when Toyota stepped up to the plate to effectively save the WEC from still birth after the withdrawal of Peugeot ahead of the start of the season.

The new TS030, a rear-axle hybrid with a normally-aspirated V8 and a super-capacitor energy-storage system, briefly led on its debut at Le Mans in the hands of Nicolas Lapierre, though the two cars went out either side of the six-hour mark. Lapierre and Alex Wurz would go on to win three of the final four races in Sao Paolo, at Fuji together with Kazuki Nakajima and again in the series finale in Shanghai.

"We were always targeting at least one win in our first season," recalls Vasselon, "but to lead at Le Mans and then win three was amazing. It was also something of a relief for the whole team after the F1."

A first championship

Anthony Davidson, Sebastien Buemi Toyota TS040 Hybrid, Fuji 2014

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Vasselon admits that Toyota "somehow undelivered" in the second season of its LMP1 programme in 2013, though he's adamant that the balance between petrol and diesel-powered machinery that year was skewed in favour of arch rival Audi. The Japanese manufacturer bounced back in 2014 with the new twin-hybrid TS040 built to the new fuel-formula rules introduced for that year.

"With an Equivalence of Technology between petrol and diesel that was as fair as it could possibly be, winning the title was a major achievement" Pascal Vasselon

Toyota won five of the eight races on the way to both the drivers' and manufacturers' crowns. The title went to Sebastien Buemi and Anthony Davidson, who won four times, two of them with Lapierre before he was unceremoniously dumped — and surely unfairly — after crashing at Le Mans and Austin in sudden rain showers while still on slicks.

"We knew with the 2013 car that we had no chance, so very early 2014 became our focus," says Vasselon. "With an Equivalence of Technology between petrol and diesel that was as fair as it could possibly be, winning the title was a major achievement."

The nearest of Le Mans misses

Kazuki Nakajima, Sebastien Buemi, Anthony Davidson Toyota TS050 HYBRID, Le Mans 2016

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Toyota might have taken a first world championship on the circuits in 2014, but it didn't win Le Mans that year. It should have buried the disappointment of so many near-misses at the Circuit de la Sarthe in 2016 only to lose victory on the penultimate lap with the TS050 HYBRID, a new car for that year with a V6 twin-turbo and a battery in place of its predecessor's super-capacitors.

Nakajima, Buemi and Davidson appeared home and dry as the clock ticked towards three o'clock after coming out on top to in a battle with the sister car of Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Stephane Sarrazin and the Porsche 919 Hybrid shared by Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb. But then on the penultimate lap Nakajima lost power.

The enduring image of that year's Le Mans is of the #5 TS050 parked on the main straight as the team worked with Nakajima to redress the problem caused by a fractured connector on a line between the turbo and the intercooler. Their efforts were in vain. The Porsche swept past to take the victory and Nakajima's final lap was too slow for the car to be classified.

The rushed development of the new 2.4-litre V6, which had been given the green light almost exactly one year beforehand, played a crucial role in the loss. The systems that would have enabled Toyota to compensate for the problem and get the car to the finish were not yet in place.

Le Mans victory at last

Fernando Alonso, Kazuki Nakajima, Sebastien Buemi Toyota TS050, Le Mans 2018

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Toyota finally claimed the piece of silverware missing from it trophy cabinet when it triumphed at Le Mans in 2018, the first of two editions of the 24 Hours encompassed within the 2018/19 WEC superseason. Buemi, Nakajima and two-time F1 world champion Fernando Alonso fought back from an early delay to triumph over the team-mates Kobayashi, Conway and Jose Maria Lopez in an internecine battle that was at times frenetic and always flat out.

"We would have beaten anyone. If you race at that speed and you don't have any problems — and we didn't — you win. Simple" Pascal Vasselon

There was, however, no factory opposition to the Toyotas after first Audi and Porsche had brought down the axe on their LMP1 programmes over the previous two years. To Vasselon though, that does not matter.

He describes Le Mans 2018 as "the fastest Le Mans in history". There was no distance record for the winning Toyota crew that year, but Vasselon reckons that's an irrelevant milestone these days.

"It is not relevant any more because you have so many more interruptions to the race, full course yellows, slow zones and so on," he explains. "What you have to look at are the green-flag laps and by that criterion it was the fastest ever.

"We would have beaten anyone. If you race at that speed and you don't have any problems — and we didn't — you win. Simple."

A new era 

Toyota is continuing its involvement in world championship sportscar racing into another new era in 2021. It was one of the key players in the formulation of the LMH regulations and the GR010 HYBRID is the result. At Spa last month, it became the fifth different Toyota to score a world series victory.

#8 Toyota Gazoo Racing Toyota GR010 - Hybrid: Sebastien Buemi, Kazuki Nakajima, Brendon Hartley

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