Hyper tension

For much of Sunday, August 22, the Toyota team in the pit was worried that its two cars could stop at any moment, denying them of the chance to secure the overall win at Le Mans, its fourth in a row. A problem with picking up fuel from the collector threatened to eliminate the two GR010s from the 24 hour race and hand the win to a grandfathered LMP1 car run by a private team. But that team, Signatech Alpine, was under pressure itself, from the Glickenhaus 007Cs, both of which made it to the chequered flag, defying pre-race predictions that they would not be reliable enough. It was then, for various reasons, quite a dramatic Le Mans 24 hours.

There were some clear signs that all was not well with the Toyotas. For instance, they dropped their stint lengths from 13 laps to sometimes as little as three. They also had a slight drop in lap time after the problems started to emerge early on the Sunday morning, but by then they were so far ahead of the Alpine and Glickenhaus entries that they could manage their pace.

Staying out on track was the only option that they had anyway. As a similar fuel issue had hit the two GR010 Hypercars at Monza in July, and then it took nearly an hour to fix it.

The cars did have the pace to stay ahead, but the risk was that one of them coughed terminally out on track. So while it looked serene from the outside, inside the cockpit the drivers were working harder than ever to put into place the ‘fix’ that the engineers in the garage had helped to figure out.

Sebastien Buemi was the first to have the fuel pick up problem in the number 8 Toyota, and he spent much of Sunday morning trying to find a solution with his race engineers.