The winning #7 Toyota’s race was fraught with challenges and run to a ‘relentless’ pace, the drivers said after the race in the press conference and to Motorsport Week.
“It was a very challenging week,” said Nyck de Vries.
“The race was relentless, we had lots of challenges come our way, but somehow we always kept going. Frankly there were many moments I thought we were out of contention, but they say Le Mans chooses you to win and I think that’s what happened to us today.”
De Vries won the race, for the first time, alongside his teammates Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi, the latter of whom is also Toyota’s team principal.
This is Toyota’s sixth win at Le Mans, but Kobayashi ranked it highly amongst those sixth, the first five of which were taken 2018-2022.
“Well I think is one of the highest, because we had so much competition. It’s different timing, but with Hypercar, BoP now, it’s difficult winning, but now I think we achieve it. We had 5 wins, in LMP1, we had a little bit less manufacturer team. So now we have more teams, had a good experience here.
Malfunctioning driveshaft sensor a key challenge for Toyota
“It was very challenging for everybody, but to achieve this ids a huge effort from all team members.”
\One of the challenges de Vries mentioned, that Kobayashi expanded on when asked by Motorsport Week, was a driveshaft sensor problem which caused the car to go into a type of safe mode.
‘We had a driveshaft sensor problem which meant we had to drive in backup mode, which is not optimal,” Kobayashi explained.
“WWe had to drive in safe mode, which is less power. At one point I think we were quite giving up. We just tried to finish the race.”
The sensor broke around the six hour mark, which put the car into backup mode, which means the car has less power available to the drivetrain in the Toyota TR010.
But the #7 car was able to come back to win, as Kobayashi recounted.
“We drove with care, but somehow we came back, with a little bit more performance from the engine. And the driveshaft sensor, which gave us a little hope,’ he concluded.
READ MORE: Kobayashi, Conway and de Vries win Le Mans for Toyota
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