Toyota launches the 1,000hp TS040

See video at end

Today, Thursday, at the Le Castellet circuit Toyota launched the car with which the Japanese giant will fight for victory in the Le Mans 24 Hours (14-15 June) and the 2014 FIA World Endurance Championship. The launch of the TS040 Hybrid came the day before the Prologue, the general rehearsal for the new season.

After Porsche on 4th March at the Geneva Motor Show and then Audi on Tuesday in the streets of Le Mans, it was Toyota’s turn to unveil its new LM P1 challenger on the Le Castellet circuit in the Var department. It’s called the TS040 Hybrid, two of which will be entered in the 2014 endurance season’s seven 6-hour races plus the pinnacle, the Le Mans 24 Hours.

The new Toyota oozes power! It has a V8 petrol engine putting out 520 bhp and when the energy from the hybrid system is fed back – on four wheels and not two as in 2013 – its output will flirt with 1000 bhp!

Thanks to this technology complying with the new technical regulations brought in by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, the Japanese company is counting on fuel savings of 25 per cent compared to last year for a car whose performance will be at least equal to that of 2013. For the technically minded: at Le Mans Toyota has opted for a hybrid capacity per lap of 6 mega joules. The engines and the hybrid systems have been developed by the Toyota Motor Sports Division in Higashifuji in Japan and the chassis by Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne (Germany). The latter breaks with the 2013 TS030 to comply with the new rules.

Toyota used the presentation to announce its driver line-ups. Alex Wurz, Stephane Sarrazin and Kazuki Nakajima will share no. 7 while Anthony Davidson, Nicolas Lapierre and Sebastien Buemi will be at the wheel of no. 8.

Yoshiaki Kinoshita, the team president: “We learned a lot in our first two seasons in the FIA World Endurance Championship and we included all this know-how in our new TS040 Hybrid, which is the most technically advanced Toyota ever built for racing. We feel that it’s very important that our sporting program makes a wider contribution to Toyota’s activities, and I’m very proud that the data, the knowledge and the technology is channeled on a regular basis from our sporting program to our colleagues in the Research and Development department who work on the cars of tomorrow. We’re champing at the bit to start our third season in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) where we’ll fight to fulfill our dream – victory in the Le Mans 24 Hours and the world endurance championship!"

Tomorrow two of the new Toyota TS040 Hybrids will take part in the Prologue until Saturday evening. This general rehearsal for the endurance season will see battle joined between 27 cars (8 LM P1s, 7 LM P2s, 5 LM GTE Pros and 7 LM GTE Ams). These two days’ testing will give the first indications of a hierarchy before the opening race of the season at Silverstone (Great Britain) on 20th April, where all the entrants will have the 82nd Le Mans 24 Hours (14-15 June) in their sights.