WEC: Toyota feels it is Le Mans underdog

Toyota should now be regarded as the underdog for the Le Mans 24 Hours, the Japanese manufacturer has insisted after last weekend's Spa round of the World Endurance Championship.

The claim was made by Toyota Motorsport GmbH race director Rob Leupen in the wake of a disappointing showing in Belgium for its two 2015-spec TS040 Hybrids that yielded a best result of a distant fifth place.

"We cannot be happy with what we have seen here in Spa, because we were expecting it to be closer; it doesn't give us a feeling of confidence," said Leupen. "We have made an improvement in lap time since last year, but it is not enough. The #2 car had a clean race but was too far off. We're going to Le Mans now as the underdog."

Leupen said that Toyota had "some hard weeks ahead" in the build-up to the Le Mans Test Day on May 31.

"We have a long list of things that we have to look into; we need to need to sit down and analyze what happened at Spa," he continued.

Toyota was running the high-downforce configuration of its heavily revised 2015 TS040 at Spa and it will run the low-downforce version of the car, which tested in public at the official pre-season WEC test at Paul Ricard at the end of March, in the 24 Hours on June 13-14.

The #2 Toyota shared by Alex Wurz, Stephane Sarrazin and Mike Conway finished three laps down on the first and second-placed Audi and Porsche at Spa. The #1 car driven by Anthony Davidson and Sebastien Buemi came home a delayed eighth after two stops adding up to 20 minutes to solve electrical problems.

The fastest lap in the race by a Toyota was 1.6s slower than the best laps set by Audi and Porsche.

Originally on Autosport.com