MOTORSPORT: Toyota ramps up Le Mans project

The Japanese giant will now field two of the TS030 cars at Le Mans, where it and Honda have suddenly become the main rivals to the mighty Audi that has dominated the 24-hour French classic over the past decade with its diesel cars.

Toyota’s return to the major league of international sportscar racing will come at the Spa six-hour race in Belgium on May 5, the second round of the series and just weeks before Le Mans in mid-June. It has hinted that it may now contest other rounds of the new World Endurance Championship (WEC) - the first sportscar series to have world championship status since the early 1990s. Toyota - which has contested Le Mans 13 times without a victory, but three second places - is the only manufacturer to have entered a hybrid in the new championship.

The TS030’s carbon fibre chassis has been developed by Cologne-based Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG), which ran Toyota’s Formula One campaign last decade, but the powertrain is from Toyota’s motorsport division in Japan. It is based on a new 3.4-litre normally-aspirated V8 and uses super-capacitors instead of batteries to store energy from its regenerative braking system.  Toyota is evaluating retrieval of energy from either the front or rear axle and will decide soon which route to take.

Austrian Alex Wurz, a two-time Le Mans winner and former Formula One driver, Frenchman Nicolas Lapierre, a champion in the defunct A1 GP series, and Kazuki Nakajima, a Japanese ex-F1 driver, will combine in Toyota’s lead entry. The line-up for the second car has not been named but Toyota Super GT and Formula Nippon driver Hiroaki Ishiura is expected to be in it after taking part in early testing of the TS030 at the Paul Ricard circuit in France this month.

“Of course we would love to win Le Mans - that is the dream for all competitors in the race,” Toyota team president Yoshiaki Kinoshita said.

“But we are realistic and we know we need to develop and to learn in order to compete with some very strong competition. Our target this year is to show the performance level of our car - and particularly the THS-R powertrain.”

THS-R stands for Toyota Hybrid System – Racing. The capacitor storage system is being developed by Toyota partner Nisshinbo. WEC regulations limit hybrid systems to recovering a maximum 500 kilo-Joules between braking zones and restrict deployment to only two wheels. Kinoshita said it was important to demonstrate the system in a motorsport arena.

“We want to prove it can bring a performance advantage, both in terms of laptime and fuel efficiency,” he said.

Toyota’s technical director for the project, Frenchman Pascal Vasselon, said: “The two main performance drivers of our hybrid car are the aerodynamics and the hybrid system.

“The development team at TMG has worked very hard to achieve an optimum aero concept based on windtunnel testing and CFD (computational fluid dynamics). The regulations for hybrid powertrains allow us to recover energy under braking and release this to improve acceleration out of a corner, delivering lap-time benefit. For any given performance level, a hybrid powertrain will achieve this with less fuel, so it is an extremely relevant technology and one we are excited to be bringing to endurance racing. Judging by the positive feedback we received during the roll-out, we have a very good base on which to build in the coming weeks.”

Lead driver Wurz is renowned for his technical ability and one of his Le Mans wins came with Australian David Brabham and Spaniard Marc Gene in a Peugeot 908 in 2009.

Wurz said he was fascinated by the challenge of competing with a hybrid car.

“It was cool to drive the car for the first time [in mid-January],” he said.

“When we put the slick tyre on I could feel the car generates a very good amount of grip, so I think we have a good base and we can turn this into a really fast car. I am definitely very happy, but my nature is also to be analytical and therefore I know there is still a lot of work to be done.”

Brabham will be back in a Honda Performance Development ARX-03a entered by the British team JRM Racing of James Rumsey in the World Endurance Championship. Brabham finished second in the car on its debut at last year’s Sebring 12-Hour in the US for American team Highcroft Racing before the project was aborted.

His teammates in the eight-round WEC will be Peter Dumbreck, the Englishman who had a spectacular crash at Le Mans in a Mercedes-Benz more than a decade ago, like those of Mark Webber, and Karun Chandhok, an Indian with a little F1 experience.

World Endurance Championship calendar

March 17 - Sebring 12-Hours, Florida, US.
May 5 - Spa-Francorrchamps Six-Hours, Belgium.
June 16-17 - 80th Le Mans 24-Hours, France.
August 25 - Silverstone Six-Hours, Silvestone, Britain.
September 16 - Interlagos Six-Hours, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
September 30 - Mt Fuji Six-Hours, Japan.
October 20 - Bahrain Six-Hours.
November 11 or 18 - China Six-Hours, date and venue to be confirmed.
 

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