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WEC Silverstone
Control issues blamed for Toyota’s qualifying woes
Toyota has revealed that control issues with its complex new TS050 Hybrid meant it couldn’t fulfil its potential in qualifying for the opening round of the FIA WEC at Silverstone.
Charles Bradley
Edited: Apr 16, 2016, 6:38 PM
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Having impressed in free practice, when it lapped on a similar pace to the Audis, Toyota suffered problems immediately in the damp qualifying session.
Both Mike Conway and Anthony Davidson radioed in with issues on their outlaps, with Davidson the worst affected as he could only manage a laptime 10 seconds off the pace.
“The issues we had were pretty major and not expected – they should be ironed out in the dry conditions,” said Davidson.
“I think we ended up where would have ended up anyway without out problems. Our car isn’t working brilliantly in the wet, it’s the first time we’ve run it in the wet in anger so we expected some issues.
“You have to learn from these days, but you want to park it and move on!
“Hopefully, if everything goes well tomorrow and the controls were working fine on the car – because it’s incredibly complex – then we’ll be in the race, I reckon. Nobody knows what the pecking order really is.
“We still have potentially an ill-handling car, but it’s such early days. It’s hard to find the window where you want to be in. I must’ve changed a million controls out there from the start of this weekend. We know we’re on the back foot.”
Conway explains his issues
Toyota teammate Conway in the #6 sister car qualified fifth, despite his problems, but was still some 5s off the pace of the Audis.
“We had some system issues with the car, some control problems – when things aren’t altogether it affects the laptime quite a lot,” said Conway. “When we left pitlane it just wasn’t running well.
“Basically everything just wasn’t correctly input into the car. Not much we could do – it was pretty average. And when it’s not running well, you don’t get the right tyre temperature. But fifth and sixth is OK, but looking at the laptimes I was like ‘whaaaat?!’ – we were 10s quicker than this yesterday.
“Porsche looks strong, but we’ve definitely got the pace to be there if we can get everything working right.”
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