TOYOTA LE MANS HYBRID
Circuit development time
ahead of the car’s debut in the Spa 1000kms is very limited, so much of the car’s testing has been carried out in component form utilising TMG’s R and D rigs. ‘Mileage targets are what we work to for reliability, then we look at performance on the rig. We have a policy of doing an endurance test on the rig before running on track. We are targeting 10,000km for the gearbox. In Formula 1 we had a target of 3000km. But it is the same processes, the same rigs and even the same people in many cases.’
UNSURPRISING SUSPENSION Even some of the mechanical design elements can be traced directly back to open-wheel cars. Whilst Toyota declined to show off the car’s suspension at Le Castellet, Vasselon did reveal a little information about the layout. It is, unsurprisingly, a double wishbone set up with pushrod-actuated dampers. ‘You would not be so surprised with the suspension design,’ he said. ‘It is inspired by the F1 cars. Why step backward by doing something different? From a kinematics standpoint we are looking at the same thing.’
www.racecar-engineering.com • Le Mans
It is no great surprise that the TS030 is fi tted with Michelin tyres of exactly the same size as those found on the Audi R18. Toyota ran Michelin tyres in Formula 1 for a number of years and Vasselon himself was once the head of Michelin’s Formula 1 programme, and spent 16 years as an engineer at the fi rm. But neither of these were the major reason for choosing the French rubber, according to the former tyre maker. ‘I think
tyres. But we may need some different compound development in the future.’ When Toyota was in
Formula 1, Vasselon and his engineers spent a lot of time analysing the performance of its competition and, when the Le Mans programme was still in its infancy, TMG staff attended the Le Mans 24 Hours with the sole intention of gathering data and fi nding out what the state of the art in Le Mans Prototype design
“everything started from
looking at the performance of the others”
that if you want to win in LMP1 there are not really any other options. Michelin have won pretty much everything for the last 10 or 15 years.’ (Mazda was the last organisation to win Le Mans using another tyre makers products, on Dunlops in 1991). ‘We are using the baseline Michelin tyres, with no special things made for this car. At the initial roll out we discovered that we do not need anything special to start with, and can set competitive times on existing
was. ‘We analysed what happens at Le Mans – things like top speeds – and with all of this data you can simulate the expected performance of the others. From that, alongside some reverse engineering, you can derive a set of targets for all areas of the car, including things like acceleration and top speed. ‘By looking at this data you
can even extract some aero effi ciency targets, drag targets and downforce targets. We went as far into detail as we could, but
everything started from looking at the performance of the others,’ admits the Frenchman. Some of the choices made
were for very pragmatic reasons. For example, the driver sits on the left-hand side of the cockpit, which for a Japanese car is unusual. ‘It is a question of visibility,’ explains Vasselon. ‘If the driver sits on the left his visbility to the right is better and to the left it is more limited. At Le Mans you have more right-hand corners than left, so we put him on the left of the car.’ One of the next steps in the car’s design phase was to determine the wheelbase. Here the engineers once again fell back on their ample experience. ‘Our own experience of high- speed, high-power aerodynamic cars is quite big, so that was our starting point. From there, it is not much use to look at what the others have done as you have your own targets. So to fi nd the wheelbase we did a specifi c study combining the effect of it on aero performance, aero stability and, for this car, weight.’
POWERTRAIN Whilst serious chassis design work on the TS030 started in early 2011, the powertrain
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