Thank Frankel it's Friday: What's the point of Toyota going back to Le Mans?

No title will be decided there but, for Toyota, it provides the opportunity to achieve something infinitely more precious: becoming only the second Japanese marque in the 95-year history of the Le Mans to win the world’s greatest endurance race.

On and off, Toyota has been trying to win Le Mans for over 30 years. Its first efforts were in 1985 and by 1992 its super quick TS010 was good enough for second place. In 1999 its TS020 (also known as the GT-One) was the quickest car by far and denied victory only by a cruelly timed puncture. Its third second place came with the TS030 in 2013. In 2014 its TS040 was the fastest car again but could do no better than third. The car was not competitive in 2015 but in 2016 its all new replacement, the TS050, died while leading with three minutes to go – in probably the cruellest last lap of the race to date. And last year the Japanese cars appeared to be running away with it until reliability issues (and a little light crashing) dashed hopes yet again.

But it really should do it in 2018 and, indeed, in 2019. Porsche and Audi having now left to pursue rather more affordable options in electric racing, Toyota remains not only the only car manufacturer left in the top LMP1 category, but the only one fielding a hybrid race car. Moreover and as Toyota’s announcement makes clear it has played ‘an active part in defining’ the regulations that govern the future of sportscar racing. And believe me, if those regs were not to its liking, it would not be taking part. I would imagine the amount of clout it brought to the negotiations as the only OEM left at the top table, relative to those tiny race teams few other than dedicated fans (who’ll go anyway) have heard of, would be considerable…

Even so and as Toyota knows better than anyone, this is a capricious race, which is of course why conquering it is so very important. You may remember that last year after all the Porsche and Toyota hybrids hit trouble the race was very nearly won by an LMP2 with hundreds fewer horsepower entered by that well known martial artist Jackie Chan.

All of which begs a question. What value is a victory at Le Mans when it is achieved by the world’s largest car company (by number of cars produced last year) against such opposition? By comparison they are not minnows – they are barely plankton. The upside is a win against no perceived opposition, the entirely possible downside a humiliating defeat by one or more teams with budgets that probably wouldn’t pay the development costs of a new Toyota door handle.

To me at least the answer is clear. Toyota has never had a better chance of winning Le Mans and, despite all that’s gone on before, it will be odds on favourites to do it with ease twice in a row. Ultimately that’s all that matters. Having spent 33 years struggling just to get on the podium, Toyota will become a multiple Le Mans winner. And while at the time some might carp about the circumstances in which those victories were achieved, the history books will not. Of all manufacturers, Toyota understands the value of the long game, which is why almost 20 years ago they put into production a funny looking car with both a petrol and electric motor, called it the Prius and started the whole hybrid revolution. Toyota knows the value to its brand of those wins not today or tomorrow but decades down the line, will be incalculable. And it knows too that by then no-one will remember how they were achieved any more than today we remember than in 1929 the opposition was so poor one of the Bentley drivers suggested that if he was told by his team to drive any slower he’d have to "get out and push the bloody thing".

Like most people I am an instinctive champion of the underdog but in this case I make an exception. Having witnessed first-hand almost all of Toyota’s attempts to win Le Mans, I know not just how much the team deserves it, but also that it races the right way: with courage, wonderful sportsmanship and quite incredible resilience and dignity in the face of at times crushing disappointment. To be denied yet again in circumstances as favourable as those it will find next year would be too cruel by far.

Photography by Ben Miles.