MOTORSPORT: Toyota's turn at Le Mans … or is it?

Surely, surely, surely Toyota will finally win the 24 Hours of Le Mans this weekend.

It will be the Japanese manufacturer’s 20th attempt at victory in what, for car manufacturers, is the greatest race on earth.

Toyota has come close numerous times, most agonisingly two years ago when its leading car froze with barely a lap to go and Porsche inherited another success.

Porsche has now withdrawn from the top class of endurance sports car racing, Le Mans Prototype 1 (LMP1), after a hat-trick the past three years, while its Volkswagen group stablemate Audi had already pulled the plug after dominating the French classic this century.

Mazda is the only Japanese manufacturer to have won Le Mans – and that was way back in in 1991 with its 787B.

New regulations for endurance racing from 2020 or 2021, perhaps with a global platform aimed at enticing more European and American manufacturers, are expected to be announced before this year’s race starts at midnight Saturday, Australian time.

For this year Toyota not only has what should be the best cars – two twin-turbocharged 2.4-litre petrol V6 TS050s with an 8 megajoule (MJ) hybrid system consisting of a motor-generator at each axle – but arguably the world’s best driver.

Spanish two-time Formula 1 world champion Fernando Alonso is frustrated by not having won in F1 for five years, through being in the wrong teams at the wrong time, and has set his sights on winning Le Mans and America’s open-wheeler classic, the Indianapolis 500.

Alonso’s co-drivers in this weekend’s twice-around-the-clock torture test are Switzerland’s Sebastien Buemi and Japan’s Kazuki Nakajima. The other Toyota is driven by Britain’s Mike Conway, Japan’s Kamui Kobayashi and Argentina’s Jose Maria Lopez.

The massive driver line-up for the full 60-car field also includes another F1 world champion, Britain’s Jenson Button, as well as Colombian firebrand Juan Pablo Montoya.

Toyota’s competition for outright honours comes from eight non-hybrid LMP1s, run by teams independent of manufacturers with engines up to 5.5 litres, and 20 LMP2s, 4.2-litre V8s without direct-injection and costing no more than A$750,000.

Two LMP2s were on the podium last year, while the best of the other LMP1s are likely to be those from Swiss team Rebellion.

A raft of changes introduced for the World Endurance Championship ‘super season’ that began with a six-hour race at Spa in Belgium last month, in which Toyota finished first and second, and will conclude at next year’s Le Mans, severely limit the fuel and energy use in the TS050s compared with their prototype rivals.

The changes restrict Toyota’s top speed to about 340km/h compared to the 360km/h of the non-hybrids allowed more aerodynamic downforce and Conway, a veteran of the Japanese make’s endurance campaigns, has warned that a Le Mans victory is “no foregone conclusion”.

The TS050s will be allowed to use only 32.5kg of fuel per stint, down from 44.1kg last year, while the less fuel-efficient privateer cars will be allowed to burn 52.9kg. The non-hybrids also will be allowed to use 210.9 megajoules of energy a lap on the 13.629km Circuit de la Sarthe and Toyota just 124.9MJ.

Apart from the 30 closed-cockpit prototypes there are 30 GT cars – 17 with fully professional drivers and 13 in which ‘gentleman drivers’ are mixed with professionals.

Long-time US-based Sydneysider Ryan Briscoe is in one of the four Fords in GTE-Pro run by Chip Ganassi Racing. Briscoe is teamed with New Zealand’s IndyCar series leader Scott Dixon and Briton Richard Westbrook.

The trio won their class at America’s 24 Hours of Daytona early this year, Briscoe has experience at Le Mans, and says it’s an event at which “you can’t relax”.

Porsche young professional Matt Campbell, from Warwick in Queensland, is ready to fulfil his boyhood dream.

In his second year in Europe, he’s in a Porsche 911 RSR run by Dempsey Team Proton Competition in GTE-Am for his Le Mans debut, while Alex Davison – now a veteran of Australian and European racing – is in another 911 for Gulf Racing.

The fourth Australian in the field is Euro-based 21-year-old James Allen in an LMP2 for G-Drive Racing.

GTE-Pro includes new Aston Martin Vantage AMRs and BMW M8s up against Corvette C7.Rs and Ferrari 488s as well as the Fords and Porsches.

In GTE-Am there are Aston Martins and Ferraris against the Porsches.

Most of the tyres for the race are Michelin. The French supplier has been fined almost A$400,000 by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) for failing to supply the nominated number of tyres for the WEC ‘super season’ on time, although it has now been given some leniency.

Inevitably the attention this weekend will be on whether Toyota, under enormous pressure to succeed, can end its Le Mans curse.

Derek Bell, the British driver now 76 who won the event four times, says that “they’ve got to win – and they probably will”.

“But they might not,” Bell said.

“They might retire back to Japan and never appear again if they don’t.

“It’s such a lottery.”