The Japanese producer was having fun with its most dominant show of the Hypercar period thus far on the WEC’s first go to to the Italian circuit, with the #7 GR010 Hybrid of Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez pulling out a snug lead over the 2 Glickenhaus 007 LMHs and the only real grandfathered Alpine A480 campaigned by Signatech.
However, simply after the four-hour mark, Kobayashi was compelled to park the 7 automobile on the run to the Ascari chicane with suspected technical points, permitting Romain Dumas to come back by way of and take an unlikely lead within the #709 Glickenhaus.
Fortunately for Toyota, the American boutique producer was compelled to make an unscheduled pitstop for a precautionary brake change, costing the #709 automobile a number of laps.
A late battle with Alpine for victory additionally didn’t materialise after Toyota was in a position to pit underneath a full-course yellow for a late splash-and-dash, retaining the general lead over the A480 pushed by Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Andre Negrao.
Following the race, Toyota stated it would examine the problem that brought on Kobayashi to crawl to a halt when each its hybrid-powered Hypercars are shipped again to its base at Cologne in Germany.
Recalling the incident that dropped the 7 crew 40s behind the Glickenhaus earlier than it managed to regain the lead, Kobayashi stated: “The automobile simply shut down one way or the other, we didn’t know what was occurring.
“We misplaced all of the powertrain. [There was an] error message on my show and clearly I had no energy in any respect. So I simply communicated to the engineer and the decision was that we have to cease the automobile and clearly we misplaced a lot time [doing so].
“At that time we needed to discover a protected place [to stop] however there was no protected place. So it price us much more time.
“It’s a bit of a shame because it looked good [until that point] but as soon as we stopped we needed to reboot the car. We lost I think around a minute, so it cost us a lot of time.
“But I feel we did an awesome job, we got here again [to recover] the [lost] time and at last we got here again to win. Thanks to all of the staff we had an awesome automobile.
“It was a shame for the reboot stuff but we got quite similar things in Spa, so we still need to understand what’s going on.”
Although Toyota has gained all three races in the beginning of the season, it has additionally confronted some teething points with its new Hypercar contender.
While the #7 automobile has been saddled with bulk of the problems thus far, the sister #8 GR010 of Kazuki Nakajima, Sebastien Buemi and Brendon Hartley needed to make 4 lengthy journeys to the storage with its personal set of issues at Monza, together with a gasoline strain concern.
That dropped the trio to thirty third place and final among the many categorised finishers, 43 laps down on the profitable automobile.
Conway admitted that Toyota has “some work to do” to kind the reliability of its Hypercar forward of the double-points Le Mans 24 Hours spherical in August.
“It was a hard fought race, plenty of ups and downs, as Kamui mentioned the issues we had,” stated Conway, who gained final 12 months’s LMP1 title with Kobayashi and Lopez. “Unfortunately automobile #8 additionally had points. But we noticed as quickly as Glickenhaus have been within the lead that they had a problem as properly.
“A tough six hours for certain however undoubtedly good momentum to enter Le Mans with. But we nonetheless acquired some work to do in phrases of reliability.
“We have to keep working hard until Le Mans and hopefully try and win that. It’s going to be [won the] hard way. We see that six races are hard enough, 24 for sure is going to be hard.”
