Toyota will accelerate its World Endurance Championship (WEC) campaign by adding a third car to the grid for the famous Le Mans 24-hour race in June. The move underlines Toyota’s determination to win the French endurance classic for the first time after it was denied victory last year through a heartbreaking last-lap mechanical failure.
But do three go into one? Where more hands represent more opportunity, but with it also comes pressure.
“It opens up more chances,” John Steeghs (Toyota Team Manager) told Motorsport Magazine. “We know that having a third car at Le Mans is definitely an advantage. Who knows, if we had had one more car last year we might well have won. We will never know. We had [to produce a third car] to give ourselves more chances.”
“We had to be able to fund it with our budget,” Steeghs says. “It’s not like we could go to Japan and say ‘we need a suitcase [of money]’ for the third car, we had to really find a way to do it. We had talked about it before, we knew we wanted to do it but it had to be agreed.
“We have had to spread some people out, we haven't been able to employ completely new teams. People that help us out from our assembly teams and testing teams will be the ones on the third car.”
Unlike Audi’s stablemate Porsche, Toyota resisted the urge to poach drivers left in the wings following Audi’s exit from the category, instead opting for a test shoot-out. Enquiries with the Audi refugees were rebuffed, leaving Toyota with a shortlist of drivers to contest a winner-takes-all testing shoot-out ultimately saw Nicolas Lapierre make his return to Toyota alongside Stéphane Sarrazin.
Additionally, it offered Toyota development driver Yuji Kunimoto a leg-up to the manufacturer’s premier category outside of Japan’s Super Formula where many WEC drivers – including Sarrazin and Lotterer – still race.
“We didn’t test too many,” added Steeghs, “because we had some drivers in the pipeline already. We had tested Rio Hirakawa, so it could have been two Japanese and Stéphane in the third car but we thought it would be better for Rio to get more experience and mature in sports cars before he moved up. So he’s getting another year in ELMS to hopefully raise his level. So far he’s shown well, maybe he’ll step back to us in future.
"Yuji being a Super Formula champion shows his good calibre. He’s experienced and is very safe and stable in the way he deals with things. He had to be at our test shoot-out, and was good from the beginning.”
Whilst three entries undoubtedly give young Japanese hopefuls a platform to show their wares and a better chance of picking up the slack should another car fail (as it did so heartbreakingly last year for Toyota at Le Mans), it also adds pressure on the team.
Resources will likely be stretched and the subtle synergy required between crew could also be sacrificed having to spread themselves across three garages.