Why Toyota can’t be allowed to walk to WEC wins
Ok, no lede-burying: they should gloriously, thunderously sprint to a win in WEC like the rare and special beasts they are. But while I have your attention let’s talk about balance of performance.
If you’ve just joined us for WEC because of some famous bloke who everyone seems to be very up in arms about going faster than some other slightly less famous blokes then I’ll resist the urge to make a convoluted joke and cut to the chase (kinda) with what the hell this big beef is about.
Why do people think the Toyotas should be power limited? Why do they think the slower cars should be levelled out to fight with them? Why would that be absolutely ludicrous just because they are all called LMP1s while not in any way being the same machinery?
CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER
Look, terminology is confusing. No place moreso than WEC, the racing series with more competitor classes than D&D* and a follower requirement no less nerdy. But for this super season, in particular, there’s a lot going on.
Not familiar with the World Endurance Championship and just reading this because everyone keeps bleating on about? You’re ok, my dudes; so the deal with most motorsport is races last, like, an hour or so — maybe a bit longer if you’re feeling spicy in the top flight, maybe a lot less if you’re down in the junior or regional categories.
An hour’s a long old time to be wrestling a car like the steering’s a sea lion you’re desperately trying to remove from a club before it gets you and all your mates banned for that business with the jelly shots. Especially for single seaters, much beyond that and your arms will be useless goo, no matter how long you spend in the gym.
Endurance racing, on the other hand, starts at 6 hours of racing and goes up to 24. Unlike the mano-a-mano bloodsport of single seaters where the other driver in your garage is your first competitor, it’s done in teams of two or three drivers who share the car and the duties of trying to get it home a) in one piece or at least, sufficiently intact to still be running and b) in a decent position.
If you watch motorsport of any sort, you’ll know that getting a car to run for an hour is slightly trickier than it might appear as a base proposal. Getting it off the grid is often the first part of the challenge. Then hoping the idiot you’ve strapped into it doesn’t smash it into someone else’s idiot and trash the whole thing within 30 seconds of lights out.
All those problems remain present for endurance racing. Especially when you contemplate the fact you have things not far off a Formula One car banging around the same circuit at the same time as a car that, were I not a penniless freelance journalist, I could rock up to a Ferrari dealership and probably drive away with the same day.
With that in mind, let’s discuss categories. The slowest cars on the grid are those aforementioned road cars — last year’s prototypes, they’re run by racing teams but with a mix of professional and amateur drivers (another plot twist WEC likes to chuck in there) and restrictions make the LMGT-AM very much the plucky underdogs of the piece. I cannot imagine the vibranium-grade nerves you need to, with limited racing experience, be banging round something limited to 500bhp, weighing almost one-and-a-quarter tonnes, with a bunch of 875kg prototype monsters tearing up into your rear-view while you’re trying to overtake some other poor, underpowered fuck and the angler-fish-looking rounded windscreen of a prototype sails past on hybrid power at over 1000bhp.
Anyway, that’s GT-AM, then there’s GT-Pro which is basically much better GT cars reserved for professional drivers. These are the works teams — so although you might get a Porsch 911 in GT-AM, it will be at least a year older in terms of spec than the 911 the big boys get to use. WEC GT racing is some of the most competitive in the world and although the Pro category, for obvious reasons, will never have the straight-line speed of a prototype these are top drivers and proper fighting — with a complex balance of performance issue of their own this year that we’ll save for another time.
Anyway, that’s the normal-looking cars. Then you’re onto the aerodynamically bulbous Le Mans Prototypes. As with GT, there’s two headline categories of these — LMP2, which as you might expect is the slightly slower of the two and non-factory and LMP1, which is now a hot, complicated mess akin to the cockpit in the 22nd hour of Le Mans when the gearbox has started getting fractious.
Right, so, a quick breakdown: there have been for some time two types of LMP1. A little bit like the difference between customer and factory F1 teams except not really at all and perhaps don’t think about that too much because that seems to be the confusion everyone has.
Factory LMP1 teams, you see, use hybrid technology. It’s the thing that makes current F1 cars go really fast, recovering electrical energy as the car drivers and redeploying it as power through the drive train — it’s really smart and LMP1 basically pioneered it as racing technology, mastering the thermal recover of MGU-H well before single-seaters did.
Which is all getting too complex before we’ve even got to the complexity.
CHARACTER BUILDING
So there are factory, hybrid LMP1s made by big manufacturers — at the peak Audi, Porsche and Toyota had competitive factory entries in the category and Nissan/Nismo also made a bold but abortive effort to develop their own.
As the fastest and most famous cars in WEC, LMP1s are a crucial element to the series and in some ways its flagship, with no other series really putting forward factory prototypes in the same way. Which was where they’ve hit a problem in recent years, as Audi and then Porsche announced their retirement from the field.
Now the lone standing factory team, Toyota are or course also the only outfit running the R&D heavy LMP1-Hybrids. These beasts, as mentioned above, have the muster to pull in excess of 1000bhp due to the electrical recovery system. For safety reasons, they’ve generally been capped at that and lower for Le Mans, which is not a Grand Prix-grade circuit, safety-wise but that’s the base potential output of the thing.
The other two types of LMP1s are the new privateers, filling gaps left by Porsche’s departure with powerful, combustion-only prototypes that are 45kg lighter than the Hybrids (to account for the lack of battery and powertrain) but lacking the hybrid system, of course relatively under-powered.
The fastest of this set are the Rebellions, which to save a load of grief let’s compare in power terms to the Toyota LMP1s: They have 700bhp. That’s the Gibson V8 pulling its maximum, which reasonably it probably won’t do for the entire of an endurance race but that’s where they are.
If you’re reasonably mathematically adept, you’ll have worked out that 700 is a smaller number than 1000. Therefore, the non-hybrid P1s will go substantially slower than the Toyota hybrids.
There’s nothing to stop anyone rocking up mid-season, as a factory team and saying ‘I reckon we can have a flippin’ good crack at this.’ Other than the lessons of what happened when Nissan did that (of which more anon) and the vast amount it would cost. But barring that, the Toyota is the most powerful car on track.
It’s also, of course, the car with the most bits to go wrong. Fuel weight available for a stint has been limited back from last year by 9kg so it’s already been brought back closer to the privateer cars but unless you literally go round and remove the electrical recovery system then it’s just got more power to draw on. Which shouldn’t be a problem.
So: there’s some cars that are slower than some other cars, they all race together but on the same track as cars that are much slower, so where’s the beef.
COMBAT MODE
The problem is a widely-misinterpreted remark from February this year, when ACO sporting director Vincent Beaumesnil told Autosport: “There will be a penalty system, of which we will release details later, in case a non-hybrid car is faster than a hybrid.”
Which sounds really unfair! What if a non-hybrid car just somehow manages to go faster, overcoming that 300bhp deficit? Wait, hang on.
He went on to say “The reason for a non-hybrid going faster can only be that we have not been given the correct data [by the relevant constructor].”
“We are saying that we have given you a certain level of performance and if you are above this level, you have misled us.”
300bhp is a massive difference. Unspeakably huge. It’s nearly 50% of the non-hybrid LMP1’s total power. The fact any of them finished the 6h of Spa even within two laps of the Toyotas is slightly bonkers.
If the Toyotas break, if their hybrid systems fail, if they’re limping on electrical power (and good ol Seb Buemi did manage to bring home a borked P1 on electrical alone last year, bless that angry croissant) then the FIA isn’t going to shoot a lightning bolt through every privateer prototype on the grid to make them crawl round behind them.
It’s just that there’s no functional way for them to go faster than the hybrids because they lack the raw power. So if they ever did, in a non-glitchy qualifying run, something would have gone wonky with the fuel flow because it is not possible to make up that deficit.
Is that a problem? Well, no. Yes, Toyota are out in front on their own right now — wait until things start going wrong, the privateer LMP1s are close enough behind them that if they had a hitch like last year’s Le Mans-winning Porsche, they couldn’t cut through the pack to the lead.
If they had a hitch like all the Toyotas stopping on track or in the pit lane last year then, yeah, a privateer team would win. But should the Toyotas be forced to turn down the hybrid system to limit their horsepower? Ok, opinions time here but: absolutely hell no.
The Toyota hybrids are the — at the moment — last of the factory LMP1s. It would be an insult to the programmes that built these terrifyingly brilliant pieces of machinery (like the Porsche 919 that just beat the F1 lap record at Spa, once the limiters were properly taken off) and a ludicrous snub to the one manufacturer left standing.
Generating nearly 500bhp off an electrical recovery system pisses quite substantially on F1’s chips. Getting it to do it for 24 hours makes Mercedes reliability look laughably poor; if this is the last of them, let that magnificent beast roar through the Le Mans night like it was meant to. And I don’t just mean the famous F1 bloke getting a chance to do some real racing.
*Jesus christ please do not get in my mentions to point out this is not the case I am obviously being hyperbolic.
