Toyota Had “Constructive” Talks on Sensor Issue Management

Toyota Gazoo Racing had “constructive” discussions with the FIA World Endurance Championship organizers about how to manage a failed mandatory sensor that cost one of its cars a likely podium at the 6 Hours of Portimao.

The No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid spent 11 minutes in the garage after an order to change the car’s driveshaft, on which a torque measuring sensor had become faulty.

Peugeot also encountered a sensor failure on its No. 94 car later in the race but was not required to swap out the driveshaft because it had covered sufficient distance.

It was able to reach the checkered flag in a backup or ‘default’ mode which reduced its performance.

Toyota’s WEC technical director Pascal Vasselon said in the build-up to this weekend’s 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps that talks to mitigate the impact of any potential future sensor issues have taken place.

Hypercar torque sensors are used for Balance of Performance purposes and are mandated by series organizers the FIA and ACO, which source them from external supplier Magicanica.

“First, it’s now clear that what has happened was absolutely not under our control,” Vasselon told Sportscar365 during a group interview at Spa.

“We have very quickly agreed with the ACO and FIA that we needed to do anything possible to avoid stopping a car when such a thing happens.

“We have had a very constructive meeting [on Wednesday] to define how the procedure could improve, to make sure that we made the best use of the data available to allow running in default mode.

“The default mode should never create an incentive to maybe gain performance here and there. It will have to be somehow a degraded mode, but not too much.

“It’s difficult to go into all the technical details, but the idea is to define a default mode that cannot be a performance gain.

“Sensors are very important. There are sensors which allow you to control the power, energy level during the stint and the differential. We have to make sure that for all these controls, the default mode allows to run the car, but certainly without any performance advantage.”

Vasselon indicated that there is now a lower chance of major delays if a car from the Hypercar class encounters issues with a WEC-mandated sensor early in a race.

“The commitment is to make the best use of the data available,” he said.

“During the first stint [at Portimao] we had 70 percent of the laps which were valid, so we had data.

“The idea is really to use as much as possible the few data available to define the default mode.”

Peugeot has also held discussions with the FIA and ACO about how to manage any future sensor failures during races.

The problems at Portimao had not been observed previously in WEC competition, although Vasselon admitted that Toyota had seen it crop up before at some stage over its last three years of testing.

“First it’s to try to understand the root cause of the failure, which is not understood yet,” said Peugeot WEC technical director Olivier Jansonnie on Wednesday afternoon.

“We have some hints, which we keep for ourselves knowing that it’s a sensor that’s shared with everybody. We are trying to protect this as much as we can, the way we service and operate our parts.”

According to Jansonnie, Peugeot is working on its “own solutions” to back up a failed sensor and that it has made “steps in that direction” since Portimao.

“This is clearly on our side; it’s part of our job,” he suggested.

“The other side is to discuss with the organizers to be allowed, or not, to run in backup mode.

“There are two things that are completely different. We have started tackling the one that is actually on our side.”