Toyota drivers Mike Conway and Brendon Hartley say that traffic management at the 24 Hours of Le Mans will be different compared to previous years due to the slower nature of the new generation of Le Mans Hypercars.
The Hypercars, which are making their racing debut at Le Mans this year, were designed to go slower than the previous generation of top-level hybrid LMP1 cars.
With the high speed differential between the top prototypes and the slower cars, particular GTE traffic, now brought down somewhat, it provides the drivers from Toyota, Glickenhaus and Alpine with a new challenge: lapping slower cars with less speed.
Conway, sharing the #7 GR010 Hybrid with Jose Maria Lopez and Kamui Kobayashi, says that the slower speeds achieved by the Hypercar has both advantages and drawbacks. On the one hand, it makes passing slower cars more predictable, but passing in certain corners has become more difficult.
“It’s definitely different,” Conway told MotorsportWeek.com. “But, you know, we’re passing less cars per lap now. The way we manage it, you know, we’re still losing time, obviously, if you don’t manage things right, but I think the time loss is not quite as bad sometimes.
“We used to try and predict it through the lap as we’re going through to not to not lose any, counting the distances between the exits at some corners to the next one to know where we’re going to pass.”
“Now it’s a bit more predictable where we’re going to be passing but it is harder to get by some corners, we can’t really pass around the outside anymore, like Porsche Curves, not as easy for us.”
“We’ve learned a lot over the last few races to know now where we’re strong or not strong.”
“But yeah, in terms of pace to the LMP2s, we’re not loads quicker on the straights anymore. So you can get caught up in some more stuff for sure. But yeah, I think we’ve learned a lot over the last few races.”
Team-mate Brendon Hartley, who comes to Le Mans as defending race winner after his win in 2020, points to another factor: the GR010 Hybrid’s power delivery.
One of the major changes made to the GR010 compared to its LMP1 predecessor, the TS050 Hybrid, is the elimination of a motor generator unit on the rear axle.
Where the LMP1 car had both, the Hypercar is only permitted a single MGU on the front axle. So although the Hypercar is still all wheel drive, like its precedessor, Hartley explains that the power delivery is vastly different.
“It’s honestly quite different, because the way we generate the lap time is quite different,” Hartley said. “So actually, I felt like cornering speed through particularly the Porsche curves wasn’t so dissimilar. So I think we’ll be passing the cars in quite a similar way in the corners.”
“The difference is that this year, we have a constant power curve, where with the LMP1 cars, we were having more than 1000 horsepower, exiting the corners, all wheel drive and so we were accelerating very quickly on corner exits. And actually top speed is not so dissimilar. So it’s just the way we generate the lap time.”
“Actually, the way we were managing our energy and we could boost a bit more here and there was was different last year.”
“I would say it’s probably easier for the other categories to understand what’s happening with our lap time and our car speed now because it’s more of a conventional power curve, probably more representable for them, just a bit quicker.”
