Unless you weren't doing something terribly important this past weekend, you're probably aware of how Toyota failed to win its first ever 24 Hours of Le Mans race by a whisker, in the last freaking lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe.
The day after the race, a lot of media outlets were reporting that a problem related to the turbocharging system was the culprit behind No 5 Toyota TS050 Hybrid's predicament in the penultimate and ultimate lap of the endurance race.
Toyota has conducted some investigations since then, and it appears that the problem was indeed related to the turbocharger(s), just not directly.
“Car #5 suffered a technical defect on a connector on the air line between the turbo charger and the intercooler, causing a loss of turbo charger control. The team attempted to modify the control settings to restore power and this was eventually achieved, allowing the car to complete the final lap. However, it was achieved too late to complete that lap within the required six minutes.” a press release update from Toyota Gazoo Racing states.
The interesting bit is that Toyota still doesn't know why the failure actually occurred, especially after almost 24 hours of racing, which were mostly trouble free. Engineers have already verified the process used to produce the said part in Cologne, but they need more time to get to the bottom of it.
What they do know for sure is that the problem is unrelated to the engine issues that Toyota experienced at the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps earlier in the 2016 season.
Since the 2016 World Endurance Championship is far from over, with six more races to go, so Toyota Gazoo Racing needs to make sure that whatever happened is a one-off problem and will not rear its ugly head during the rest of the reason.
Haters will probably say that everything went belly up when Toyota decided to switch from a naturally aspirated, old-school, V8 in its previous LMP1 prototypes to a twin-turbocharged, 2.4-liter V6. Of course, that decision was taken in the pursuit of efficiency, and everyone can agree that the TS050 Hybrid was about to win at Le Mans for that very reason.
Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project. Full profile
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