– Toyota Racing admits that the late technical failure that cost the team the seemingly certain victory at the Lone Star Le Mans of the World Endurance Championship (WEC) is hard to cope with.
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The failure meant another disappointment for Toyota at the Circuit of the Americas, where after nine attempts they are still waiting for their first WEC victory.
“That was a very unfortunate race for us,” says Kobayashi, who also acts as team principal at Toyota. “We were consistently strong and ran a perfect race for almost six hours. When the hydraulics fail, there is nothing you can do but retire the car.”
“It was a huge opportunity for us to score many points, so of course it is hard to accept. But that’s endurance racing. We have to learn from it and improve so that we come back stronger at our home race.”
According to Toyota technical director David Floury, the problem had never occurred before. The crew of #7 had traveled to Austin tied on points with Robin Frijns and Rene Rast from BMW #20 as championship leaders. Due to the late failure, the Toyota trio missed the chance to capitalize on the difficult races of BMW #20 and Ferrari #51 (Pier Guidi/Calado/Giovinazzi).
“We can’t be happy that our championship rivals also had a difficult day. When you fight for a world championship, you have to be perfect. And today we had a problem with #8 that led to a drive-through penalty and one with #7 that caused the retirement.”
Perfect race until the failure
Toyota #7 (Conway/Kobayashi/de Vries) started the 6-hour race in Austin from ninth on the grid – directly behind the sister car #8 (Buemi/Hartley/Hirakawa).
While #8 went “off sequence,” #7 stuck to the conventional strategy and worked its way up to fourth place by the third hour. After the safety car at mid-race, the crew of #7 finally became a contender for victory when de Vries took the lead with several impressive maneuvers.
Kobayashi continued de Vries’ work in the fifth hour before handing the car back to the Dutchman for the final stint.
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About ten minutes before the end, Nyck de Vries pulled off the track after a sudden problem, towed the car back to the pits, and had to retire from the race. The cause was a hydraulic failure that led to the loss of power steering on the Toyota TR010 Hybrid, making it impossible to continue.
TV images showed a dejected de Vries burying his head in his hands after bringing the damaged Toyota back to the garage in the final minutes.
“Obviously a very sad end to a great day,” he says. “We really gave everything and the execution was extremely good. We had a great car and delivered when it mattered. But unfortunately, this is a technical sport and the technology let us down today.”
Wrong strategy and drive-through penalty for #8
After the retirement of #7, Toyota’s hopes rested on the sister car #8, which eventually finished the race in sixth place.
On the alternative strategy, Hirakawa was even in third place in the penultimate hour before receiving a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane. However, the violation was not due to driver error: a technical malfunction caused Hirakawa to exceed the speed limit while accelerating out of the pit lane.
“We had the pace, but it was not our day,” explained Hirakawa. “Unfortunately, there was a system problem during the driver change that cost time when starting and subsequently led to the speeding in the pit lane. The result was a drive-through penalty,” said the Japanese driver.
“I am extremely sorry for what happened to car #7. It was not our race, but we have to work hard to ensure this does not happen again. The next race is Fuji – there we want to get back on the podium.”
Despite the disappointing retirement in Austin, the trio of #7 still leads the drivers’ world championship together with the BMW duo, while Toyota now holds a nine-point lead in the manufacturers’ standings.
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