Toyota's doomed attempt to conquer F1 with a Le Mans team: 'They couldn't handle the pace'

“Basically it was my first full season with a factory team – there was no question about taking it.”

However, that factory team was set up in a way like few had been done before. Toyota opted to keep its motor sport base in the German city of Cologne, hardly an F1 centre of gravity, and it also transferred a huge number of staff over from its previous racing endeavours.

“There were a lot of new people from rally and from the endurance side – very few experienced people in there,” says Salo.

“It was a bit of a struggle at the beginning to make everything work and to work properly on it. It wasn’t easy.”

“When we went to Melbourne [for Toyota’s first race] I think there was less than a handful of people that had actually been in a Formula 1 team before,” adds McNish. “Fundamentally Mika and his engineer [Humphrey Corbett] were the two most experienced people in the team in terms of F1.

“I think Toyota was a very, very good F1 university. There was a lot of really good people that came out of it. However, you have to learn in university, you don’t arrive at that level.”

Gass further explains how this attitude permeated how Toyota went about F1 racing.

“We just used the old car to gain experience in the team to learn the tracks to learn the procedures, how to operate at the track.”

Such a deadweight was the TF101, that mercurial designer Gustav Brunner was poached from Minardi, to completely start again and pen a new car, the TF102.

“It wasn’t a great car,” Salo remembers. “But the engine was mega, really beautiful – so it made up for some of the faults in the car.”

“By the time we got to Melbourne, we had got reliability done,” adds McNish.

With a relatively solid foundation now to work from, Toyota finally made its racing debut at the 2002 Australian GP, actually scoring a famous first result – and it all hinged on one moment.

Salo and McNish qualified in 14th and 16th respectively, but a huge opening-corner pile-up took out both. As McNish remembers, a bit of Le Mans know-how brought his team-mate back into play whilst the race was stopped.

“They got into a problem to find the solution – in F1 normally you would have said ‘That’s it, it’s done.” Allan McNish

“Mika had damage to a track-rod or a wishbone, and they changed it,” he says. “That was not an F1 philosophy, but a rally philosophy, a sports car philosophy.

“So there was some parts of it was actually good because they got into a problem to find the solution – in F1 normally you would have said ‘That’s it, it’s done.'”

Salo was back in the restarted race, and came through to score a point with a sixth-placed finish, but Gass actually notes at the time that Toyota wasn’t satisfied with a credible first-time result.

“Mixed emotions,” he says. “We were coming up on Mark Webber, and Mika really should have already taken him – but messed up and spun. So the feeling was we should have had two.”

However after one more point scored by Salo in Brazil, that was all the reward this gargantuan F1 effort would get in its first season. Though the Brunner-designed car was reliable and therefore a solid base to work from, inherent issues in performance were quite simply not addressed fast enough, leaving the race team on the back foot for the rest of the season, as McNish explains.

“There were already some political aspects between the engine and chassis departments” Dieter Gass

“Traction was not good,” he says. “I didn’t like ‘understeery’ cars, it was never my thing. And we were in the grooved tyre era, so it kind of sat into a bit of an understeer.

“Generally we lacked downforce [too] – I would say drivability wasn’t too bad but you didn’t have maybe the working window that you would have had in other cars.

“But it wasn’t as if it was was a horrible car to drive, it just lacked overall performance.”

However, as Gass reveals, the shortcomings in the TF102’s design revealed deeper fissures within Toyota’s F1 organisation. He suggests that the engine might not have been as good as some thought, and that a general lack of cohesion was hampering efforts.

“At the beginning there were already quite some political aspects between the engine and the chassis department,” he says. “The senior management listened to the ‘politicking’ of the engine department.

“We were fastest on the straight most of the time. The race team was saying, ‘Yeah, we’re fastest on straight, because we have no drag, because we have no downforce! And that’s why the lap times aren’t upcoming.’ So it was difficult to get the development in the right direction.”

Though keen to stress he had good relationships at Toyota overall, Salo adds that this “politicking” made the atmosphere in some sections of the team unpleasant at times: “It’s not nice when you hire a lot of people, and you don’t trust [some of] them.”

The team did have other opportunities to score points, but let these slip through their fingers. Ironically after so much testing practice, a botched pitstop in Malaysia denied McNish of his debut F1 points. He never would score at the top level of racing.

“That was a lowlight – I came away from Malaysia so disappointed,” he says. “The biggest one that was really tough though was running sixth in Monza when the front suspension gave up because of a technical issue.”

This late season chance-missed was actually a semi-positive blip on a downward trajectory throughout the year, as the team turned its attention to 2003. Gass and McNish elaborate on how the lack of developments meant it was all a question of too little too late in ’02.

“With the benefit of hindsight, the team at the design office weren’t used to doing things at the pace which you need to have in F1 – they were used to endurance and rallying,” says Gass. “In endurance you have just one race in a season [Le Mans], you don’t update the car on a two-week basis.”

“We realised we were fighting an uphill task, because we were competitive enough for points at the start, then suddenly you get to Budapest and if we have a good day, we might finish 12th!” says McNish. “That’s tough in reality, because you know that you’re actually just making up the numbers to some extent.”

Whilst treading water in the midfield, Toyota then raised eyebrows in deciding to make a driver change for 2003 midway through the ’02 season, bringing essentially like for like in with an elsewhere-successful rookie in Cristiano Da Matta and an experienced hand in Olivier Panis.

Salo, who had a multi-year contract and had been banking on development work paying off in 2003, was particularly peeved, saying at the time: “I really hope they struggle a lot. I’m happy I’m not there, I couldn’t take that any more, one more year of the same thing.”

“It’s always easy to blame the drivers,” he says now, in a slightly more reflective mood. “From a few races into 2002 they were already complaining that the drivers were not performing. It was all from certain people. They would ask you: ‘Why don’t you brake ten metres later for that corner, like the Williams?’ ‘Because I’m going to go off if we brake then!’ In the end, because of the politics, I was happy to leave.”

That wasn’t all in this eventful year though. Both Toyota’s would suffer sizeable accidents during the season. Salo is typically laconic when describing having to nerf his TF102 into the wall at Monaco to slow after he noticed a brake pad had fallen off – “My Sauber rear wing fell off three times at 300km/h, I’m used to it” – whilst McNish suffered one of the all-time huge F1 shunts after deciding to take on Suzuka’s formidable 130R flat in practice.

“Energy wise, that was the biggest crash by a long, long way,” he says. “I got it really hooked up through Spoon, and thought ‘Well, I’m eight tenths up, you’ve got to give it one boy!’

“So I kept my foot in it and the rear diffuser stalled because there’s a couple of little bumps in there, got a tank-slap on and off it went backwards. I’m glad they didn’t let me race afterwards.”

“You heard cars coming, and all of a sudden there was silence,” remembers Gass. “He opened the radio, and you only heard him heavily breathing. He wasn’t saying anything. That was that was massively scary.”

McNish thankfully came through unscathed, but he would never race in F1 again. Looking back now he, Salo and Gass are relatively philosophical about that eventful debut year with Toyota, being part of a project that would eventually pull out of F1 in 2009 with podiums and poles but no race wins.