Toyota was playing down its chances of another Le Mans 24 Hours win ahead of the 94th edition of the great race. Yet it pulled off its sixth and arguably most significant victory in the French enduro. This time it prevailed over a deep and competitive field, which was not the case when it was the only major manufacturer at the end of the LMP1 and the beginning of the Hypercar eras in 2018-22. But as in the past the Japanese manufacturer had to overcome the best attempts of the race to beat it. Toyota needed to think on its feet to overcome glitches that might have stopped a lesser team in its tracks on the way to a 1-3 result, Kamui Kobayashi, Nyck de Vries and Mike Conway taking the win and Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa coming home third.
The winning Toyota TR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar didn’t look like a contender early in the race. Stopping both cars early to get them into some clean air worked a treat for the #8 entry with Buemi at the wheel, but not for #7 driven by Conway. Toyota technical director David Floury pointed out that such strategies are an imprecise science that need a bit of luck. There was also a slow puncture for de Vries during his first triple stint after taking over the car. Worse was to come, however.
At around 21:00 on Saturday night a glitch with one of the driveshaft torque sensors used to control and monitor power delivery in the Hypercar class started malfunctioning. Toyota had to use all the tools available to it to overcome the problem. Initially, it had to back off on power, to avoid the car going into what Floury called “default mode”. He admitted that the sensor subsequently “decided to partially come back”, by which he meant it started working close to how it should. But it still required some close management.
“We identified some patterns that were triggering it to go into default and we were briefing the drivers not to go into those specific conditions,” he explained. “We managed to survive with a decent power for the remainder of the race, but it was a bit up and down. There were some periods where we were running normally, others when we were down on power.” When the sensor was playing up the most, he reckoned, the top speed differential between the two Toyotas was as much as five miles per hour.
Given the woes for #7, Buemi and his team-mates had appeared to be the Toyota crew most likely to give the marque another Le Mans victory after the two near misses of 2023 and ’24 and a race last year where it was barely in the game. But their race unravelled late on as the contest moved towards three-quarters’ duration. After the wheels came off the car at a scheduled stop, the Toyota crew noticed metal filings inside the left front rim: a groove was being machined on its internal surface. A mechanic then went out to the pit stall and found an errant screw.
The next job was to find out where said screw had come from. Toyota matched up the damaged wheel with a spare suspension corner and ascertained that the fixing was from the mounting of the brake cooling drum. At the following routine stop, just before the top of hour 18, Toyota found out that in fact two screws had gone. The issue was sorted over two pitstops. The first lost it a shade under a minute, the second next to nothing. Toyota’s good fortune was that it was able to make the repairs during the second of the two safety cars that interrupted the race. It was called almost immediately after Hirakawa returned to the track after the first go at fixing the problem.
Speedy repairs during pitstops prevented the #8 Toyota's race from being derailed, while the safety car intervention timing aided both cars
Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt
The safety car was important in the story of Toyota’s race. Not only did it allow the #8 a free stop to get on top of its problem, but it brought #7 back into the game. The winning car had been languishing the better part of two minutes down the order beforehand as a result of its earlier woes. Now back on more or less equal terms with the erstwhile frontrunners, Kobayashi and de Vries - Conway was missed out of the rotation after his two earlier triples — brought the car into the picture. The #7 Toyota didn’t lead the race until right at the start of the 21st hour, but when it got there, it pretty much stayed there.
Two laps later, the eighth FCY of the race was called at the moment both the leading Toyota and the chasing #12 Jota Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh with Louis Deletraz at the wheel were due to pit. They had to take an emergency 10s splash of fuel before returning to a lap later for a pitstop proper. It did little to derail the Toyota’s charge: Kobayashi was still in the lead when the pitstop cycle was complete and the #7 car would lead all but six laps over the remaining three hours.
The safety car was also a blow for the marque that turned out to be Toyota’s closest rival as the race drew to a close; BMW undoubtedly was the biggest loser. The #20 M Hybrid V8 LMDh run by WRT that ultimately finished between the Toyotas in the hands of Rene Rast, Robin Frijns and Sheldon van der Linde had a lead of 20s over the #12 Caddy in which Deletraz joined Will Stevens and Norman Nato as the race headed into its second full caution.
"This race has got its ways to humble everything and everyone. For maybe a two-dollar piece, it came to a crushing end" Sebastien Bourdais
The BMW had flown in van der Linde’s hands in the cool conditions of the morning. A car that Rast had propelled into the lead on the opening lap suddenly looked like a genuine contender again. It appeared to lose something as the temperatures rose but then gained it back as they increased yet further in the afternoon. The BMW emerged from the final FCY kerfuffle 20-odd seconds in arrears of the race-leading Toyota. The gap between first and second pretty much stayed that way until Kobayashi backed off in the closing stages. The final margin of victory was 10.9s, making it the closest timed finish in Le Mans history, even if the final hours of the race lacked the jeopardy of the previous closest, the 13s of the Audi versus Peugeot LMP1 confrontation of 2011 or 14s of the 2024 and 2025 editions in the Hypercar era. Frijns, who was at the wheel of the Bimmer at the end, kept Kobayashi honest rather than putting him under any genuine pressure.
There were only two cars in it at the end. The second Toyota faded, as did the challenge of the #12 Caddy, which unravelled after the final FCY and ended up fourth at the finish. Frijns was able to get past Buemi on the run to the Porsche Curves early in the penultimate hour and, on fresher tyres, pull away.
“We had a good day, but we didn’t have it at the end,” said Hartley, who admitted disappointment with his final stints before handing over to Buemi. “You have to say that #7 deserved it: they nailed the last few hours. I’m not happy with how my last stint in the race went. I feel somehow responsible. I felt like my last stint didn’t go very well, and it all kind of fell away from there.”
The #20 BMW had the pace to win but unlike Toyota the safety car timing hurt its charge
Photo by: Marc Fleury
The #12 was cursed by the FCY at Le Mans this year. It had to take an emergency pitstop three of the eight times the race was neutralised virtually. The last time turned out to be crucial. “That’s where we lost touch with the leaders,” reckoned Deletraz. “If you look at the winning Toyota’s pace, doing 3m25s and 26s, I don’t think we could have matched that. But maybe if we’d been up there and had track position, things could have been different.”
This was, however, definitely a race that Caddy could have won, but the quicker of Jota’s cars was long since out of the race as the event moved towards its climax. Jack Aitken had taken pole, reprising the absent-with-injury Alex Lynn’s qualifying top spot last year, only to lose it for a procedural infringement. He had been sent into the fast lane on pitroad a minute early in the Hyperpole 2 session, the third round of qualifying. It mattered little. Aitken and team-mates Sebastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber were frontrunners throughout the first 12 hours, leading more than a quarter of the 193 laps up to the halfway point.
It all went wrong shortly afterwards. An issue with a control system on the power steering brought the Caddy with Bourdais at the wheel into the pits. It would stay there for nearly half an hour. After a longer stop of nearly two hours, Bamber did briefly return to the track, but following an off at Mulsanne Corner, the car was pulled into its box at 08:00 on Sunday morning and the shutters pulled down signalling its retirement.
For Bourdais, the steering issue was a “dagger to the heart” as he bid for a first overall Le Mans victory in what was his 19th participation. “This race has got its ways to humble everything and everyone,” he said. “For maybe a two-dollar piece, it came to a crushing end. We definitely seemed to have a lot of pace, but I don’t know if we were quicker than the Toyota.”
There was nothing between the #38 Caddy and the #8 Toyota over the first half of the race. On a 50-lap average, the gap was just one thousandth of a second. How it would have stacked up against the #7 over the run-in will never be known.
The 94th Le Mans was a race that was only going to be won by one of three manufacturers. After the Test Day on the Sunday leading into race week when all eight Hypercar marques ended within a second, there was hope that the Balance of Performance might finally do its job over 24 hours of racing around the Circuit de la Sarthe. Many of the manufacturers begged to differ and it quickly became clear once the cars returned to the track that it wasn’t going to be the case.
After a wide-open field at the end of the Test Day, by the race it was clear the fight for victory was between Toyota, BMW and Cadillac
Photo by: Daniele Paglino / NurPhoto via Getty Images
There was veiled criticism of the BoP from around the paddock, including, ironically, from Toyota. Floury talked about “two-class qualifying” after LMDh machinery blocked out the top seven places on the grid. Neither Toyota made it through to H2, though the TR010s were quicker than their 14th and 15th qualifying positions suggested. Kobayashi lost his fastest time to a track limits violation, but he still pipped team-mate Hirakawa, who ran into traffic on his quick lap.
Ferrari, bidding for four in a row with the 499P LMH, suggested that the odds were going to be against it. And so it turned out. It was little more than a bit player on the way to fifth with 2023 winners Antonio Giovinazzi, James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi. It tried to mix it up on strategy. Pier Guidi was one of only two drivers to do a quadruple stint on a set of the medium compound Michelin tyre during the night and it tried mixing and matching the hard and the soft across the four corners of its cars at different stages of the race. Perhaps the telling fact about its tyre strategy was the limited use of the soft made by either of the two factory cars or the satellite entry also run by AF Corse. Only once did a Ferrari run on four soft tyres, and that was on the #50 car shared by Nicklas Nielsen, Antonio Fuoco and Miguel Molina after it had been delayed by a fire extinguisher issue. It was effectively testing tyre options that could potentially be used on the other two cars. The minimal use of the soft suggested that the Ferrari was running heavier than its competitors, though of course only the teams know whether that is indeed the car because the BoP is no longer in the public domain.
“I think it was clear from the Test Day that the field was unbalanced and that we were not one of the top performers,” said Mauro Barbieri, Ferrari’s head of performance. “We tried everything we could to close the gap, different combinations and different mixes, but the gap to the top three cars was just too big.”
The Toyota, on average, was the quickest car through the race, though there were times when BMW and Cadillac had an edge
The Ferrari was the fourth quickest car at Le Mans this year, nip and tuck with the Alpine A424 LMDhs run by Signatech. The best of the French cars, the #35 entry shared by Antonio Felix da Costa, Charles Milesi and Ferdinand Habsburg, split the only Ferrari factory car to make the finish and last year’s winners Robert Kubica, Phil Hanson and Yifei Ye.
The Toyota, on average, was the quickest car through the race, though there were times when BMW and Cadillac had an edge. But the Japanese manufacturer performed in all conditions, which was very much the target when it underwent its aerodynamic overhaul for this season. Moreover, it was a raceable machine that was light on its tyres. The #8 car did a quadruple on Sunday morning, though not on the medium like the Ferrari, but on the soft.
But perhaps most importantly, Toyota performed in the pits. Strategically it got it right and its boffins once again saved the day.
Toyota celebrates its sixth win at Le Mans - and arguably its most important
Photo by: Marc Fleury
