RET127 Temp Digital

6 T his is the fifth and final year of competition for the Toyota TS050 LM P1 car, which has now won Le Mans three times in a row. Next year ushers in the WEC’s Hypercar era, for which Toyota remains a fully committed player. In 2018, Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe (TGRE, known at the time as Toyota Motorsport GmbH) unveiled the GR Super Sport Concept, a supercar incorporating the TS050’s powertrain, which was assumed to be the basis of its 2021 Le Mans Hypercar (LMH). The car was even demonstrated at Le Mans this year. Nevertheless, TGRE has confirmed to RET that an entirely new powertrain is undergoing development in Japan for next year’s contender. This will again use a V6 turbo IC engine, albeit of a brand new design, in acknowledgement of new conditions imposed by the LMH powertrain regulations and presumably to maximise the potential of the latest in lean-burn combustion chamber technology. Whereas the current LM P1 powertrain regulations use fuel-flow PROTOTYPE restriction as the primary means of control over engine output, in the Hypercar era each car will have to respect a permitted upper limit for IC engine output combined with (if any) energy recovery system (ERS) output at any given percentage of maximum crankshaft speed. This graph of maximum permitted power versus crankshaft speed will be the same for all competitors, and it will be up to individual teams as to how it is respected. Compliance will be monitored using torque sensors, the data from which will be available to competitor and organiser alike. Thus, with all competitors having to respect the same power unit output constraint, the challenge for the powertrain developer will be to obtain performance as close as possible to the permitted curve throughout the deployed crankshaft speed range, and above all to optimise driveability and minimise fuel consumption as a function of that. In essence, with all power units having essentially the same output, it will be driveability and fuel weight/stint length that will be the differentiating factors – along with durability of course. Hypercars emerge End of the road at Le Mans for the Toyota TS050 LM P1 – next year it will be replaced by a Hypercar