Toyota ‘very sad’ to take back-to-back Le Mans wins

David McCowen news.com.au

A poorly-handled puncture cruelled the hopes of a crew which led the majority of the race, snatching victory away in the last hour.

Having finished second to a Toyota featuring F1 star Fernando Alonso in 2018, the number seven crew of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez set out to dominate this year’s race.

Conway went out hard in the opening stint, breaking lap records to put more than 30 seconds between his car and the machine shared by Alonso, Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima.

The less-fancied Toyota crew beat the odds to put Alonso’s car a lap down by daybreak, and well clear of independent teams which proved fast but fell out of the running with crashes and tech trouble.

Alonso’s crew had no answer for the pace shown by Conway and co before a puncture struck with Conway at the wheel.

A controversial decision not to replace all four tyres when the problem occurred cost them victory as the team changed the wrong tyre when Lopez first stopped.

The team attributed its blunder to a dodgy sensor.

Buemi, part of the winning crew, said his teammates’ shocking luck had echoes of 2016, when a Toyota stopped with technical trouble in the last five minutes of the race.

“It doesn’t feel so good because car seven deserved [to win],” he said.

“I understand how they feel because it happened to us in 2016.

“It doesn’t feel so good.”

Fellow winner Nakajima said the result was “very sad in the end”, while Alonso used his time on the podium to ask a crowd of 252,000 to applaud the second-placed crew.

“They were the best over 24 hours, the fastest car there,” Alonso said.

“Only the luck today chose that they have the trophy.”

Conway spoke with Australian media ahead of the race, telling reporters the key to victory is “executing exactly, all the time”.

“We can’t make any mistakes,” he said.

“Getting through the 24 hours with no incidents, with reliability and so on, that’s always the challenge.

“Nothing is a given. We know it can happen, even something small.”

And it did.

Alonso, Buemi and Nakajima won the World Endurance Championship title at the end of a one-off “super season” which included two tilts at Le Mans.

Signatech Alpine, a team representing Renault’s sports car spinoff, took the LMP2 class for V8-powered prototypes.

Ferrari won a close-fought GTE-Pro class in the 24 hour contested by factory-backed teams and elite drivers.

Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Daniel Serra combined to take victory ahead of two Porsches.

Australia’s Ryan Briscoe finished sixth in class for Ford in its last outing as a factory-backed team at Le Mans.

An independent Ford crewed by Ben Keating, Jeroen Bleekemolen and Felipe Fraga won the GTE-Am category for mixed amateur and professional crews. Young Australian racer Matt Campbell took fifth in the class for Porsche.