Doug Nye: Le Mans – the ultimate test of the machine

Porsche’s good fortune in having so many of their closest rivals strike even worse difficulty was matched in extremity by Toyota’s appalling fortunes. The conservative orthodoxy of the giant Japanese motor company’s thinking has seldom been applied with conspicuous success to major-league motorsport. The brand’s most successful operation was undoubtedly their World Rally Championship involvement from 1990-1994 when they won the title with drivers Carlos Sainz (twice, 1990 and 1992) Juha Kankkunen (1993) and Didier Auriol (1994).

The WRC programme made way for an ambitious foray into the fraught world of Formula 1 in 2002. Progress was steady but unspectacular until 2005 when Toyota finished fourth in the World Championship and went into 2006 expecting to win Grand Prix races, only to fall short. In addition to its misfiring works team, Toyota latterly supplied Formula 1 engines to such teams as Williams, Jordan and Midland-become-Spijker between 2005 and 2009 – without much conspicuous success. On 4 November 2009, Toyota announced its immediate withdrawal from Formula 1, ending the team's involvement after eight winless seasons.

This was bad news for what had become the world’s largest motor manufacturer, but meantime Toyota had also tried terribly hard – on occasion – to win the single most spectacular road-racing prize that International motor sport can offer – victory in the Le Mans 24-Hour race. 

After private efforts used Toyota power in the 1970s, and a Dome Toyota Celica failed to qualify at Le Mans in 1980 the marque has since contested most editions of the great race ever since 1985. But the one thing they never managed to build into any of their extremely potent, front-running contenders has been good luck.

This was demonstrated in the most gut-wrenching of circumstances at Le Mans last year, when their leading car – looking an absolutely gold-plated certainty to win and so break Toyota’s duck in the 24-Hour classic, actually failed at the beginning of the very last lap. So a Porsche 919 hybrid LMP1 car won instead, handed victory in the last four minutes after 24-Hours of Toyota superiority. 

This year Toyota fielded three of their spectacular-looking TS050 Hybrid LMP1 Coupes with biturbo petrol-burning 2.4-litre V6 engines, supplying an 8 megajoule hybrid system with lithium-ion battery power storage, and 4-wheel-drive transmission. These complex cars shattered all records around the Sarthe in qualifying, started from pole position…and failed yet again, or encountered almost grotesque bad luck, during the long race.

After their memorable chase back through the field in a truly memorable recovery exercise, it was Porsche 919 driver Timo Bernhard who took his second outright Le Mans win, and his third in total, while co-driver Earl Bamber claimed his second outright win to join his 2015 triumph with Porsche while the third crew member, fellow Kiwi Brendon Hartley, became a Le Mans winner for the first time.

Despite being gobbled-up by the victorious LMP1-class Porsche into that final hour the Chinese-backed Jackie Chan DC Racing team’s Oreca made history as the first LMP2 car to lead outright at Le Mans while eventually securing class victory and second place overall… and its sister car was third.

But – at least in recent times – there was very much something for British fans to celebrate as Johnny Adam muscled his Aston Martin Vantage to GTE Pro-class victory, only displacing Jordan Taylor’s leading Chevrolet Corvette as the battling pair crossed the timing line to enter the final lap. 

The Corvette and Aston Martin cars had been disputing the lead throughout the final quarter of the 24-Hour race and after Adam’s failed attempt to drive through on the tight line into Arnage Corner had been resisted by Taylor, the Corvette drive bounded through the gravel trap at a Mulsanne Straight chicane, puncturing a tyre. In fact, he was also overtaken by British driver Harry Tincknell in a Ford GT for second place before limping across the finish line.

Just examine the Le Mans cars at close quarters in the Festival of Speed paddock – these incredibly sophisticated and complex projectiles are right out there at the forefront of current competition-car technology…and it shows.

Many years ago Stirling Moss assured me “Doug – you must never confuse Le Mans with a motor race”. Well, that was demonstrably true back into the 1950s and perhaps for 20 or 30 years after that. But since the 1990s car reliability has generally improved so very much that today the great Le Mans race is more like a sequence of 24 one-hour sprint races, all flat-out, all totally committed, and all counting towards an admirable end result. And it shows.

Photography courtesy of LAT Images