Where one journey ends, another begins. Last week, the FIA World Endurance Championship lost Peugeot; this week, Toyota unveiled its entry, the TS030 Hybrid, which is set to join the fray in specific races.
The TS030 Hybrid is the successor to the TS010 and TS020 cars which participated at Le Mans with podium success during the 1990s, and the new 4.65 metre-long car sits on a brand new carbon-fibre LMP1 chassis that has been developed and produced at TMG.
The TS030 Hybrid is powered by THS-R (Toyota Hybrid System – Racing) powertrain consisting of an all-new V8 3.4 litre normally-aspirated petrol engine and hybrid system, the latter featuring a capacitor storage system developed by official team partner Nisshinbo.
Testing and evaluation is continuing on the merits on the front motor system – produced by Aisin AW – and a rear motor system developed by Denso, with regulations limiting hybrid systems to recovering a maximum of 500 kJ between braking zones whilst restricting deployment to only two wheels.
In announcing the arrival of the TS030 Hybrid, which made its first roll-out on track at Paul Ricard earlier in the month, the company also revealed its intention to race two cars in specific races. The Toyota Motorsport vehicle will make its race debut on May 5 in the Six Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, the second round of the FIA World Endurance Championship,and two TS030 Hybrids will be entered in the subsequent Le Mans 24 Hours on June 16-17.
A driver line-up of Alex Wurz, Nicolas Lapierre and Kazuki Nakajima has already been confirmed for one car, while discussions are still ongoing to finalise the driver line-up for the other.
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Woooowwww….after so song holiday there comes new updates…hehehehehhe
i want me one of that
a typical le mans prototype racing car pattern… only with a toyota badge… owh…
so what you expect? This is LMP1 car, not GT category.
This will be enough to tempt Honda to join the circus next year. Then the Korean will follow suit. Hopefully.
Honda/Acura is already supplying the ARX chassis/engine to a number of customer teams for a number of years now. They’re not factory teams but still quite competitive against the Lolas et al.
As for shape of the new Toyota machine, its all driven by the ACO regulations. The basic silhouette looks similar but the various details are quite different. They are in fact quite different to the Audis. Looks more like the Aston-Lola actually
Seem promising.
Good news for Le Mans fans, after Peugeot’s pull out.
Hopefully this T can offer us a good dogfight with Audi.
Unlikely in 2012 but it Toyota surely has the potential to keep Audi honest 2013 onwards. By that time however Audi might tone down their campaign to make way for it’s brethren Porsche.