How Toyota aims to escape from the shadows of a rough 2025 FIA WEC campaign

Is Toyota set to reclaim its place at the top of the Hypercar pecking order in 2026? After a dominant 1-2 finish in last weekend’s 8 Hours of Bahrain and developing a new-look aero package for the GR010, which will debut next year, the Japanese manufacturer is finally back on an upward trajectory following its largely forgettable 2025 campaign.

Heading into the final round of the season just gone, the mood was rather bleak. Through seven races, the brand’s Manufacturers’ World Championship defense never truly got going, with zero podiums or pole positions to show for the efforts of its two crews. A combination of Balance of Performance swings, a strengthened field of competitors and an ageing car left everyone in the TGR garages scratching their heads and wishing the second half of the season away.

But Toyota looked back to its best in the Middle East, on a circuit which it has won every year since 2017. It was a win that rejuvenated the whole team ahead of a crucial off-season, and salvaged its record of claiming at least one podium finish per season dating back to the WEC’s inaugural campaign in 2012.

In 2026, Toyota hopes to build on its Bahrain performance and rediscover its Le Mans and title-winning form with the aero update it has developed for its LMH prototype. How significant is the change? The team isn’t yet sure whether the car will be re-homologated as the GR010 over the winter or adopt a new name.

“There are many changes to styling, the car’s identity, with a new aero package that we hope will improve the car,” Toyota Gazoo Racing’s technical director, David Floury, told RACER in a media roundtable in Bahrain. “All cars are measured in a wind tunnel to get an aero window, which is quite narrow. Within this window, we are trying to make the car easier to drive and gain lap time from there. We want it to be more consistent. 

“Definitely in Le Mans, we were down in straight-line speed, but why is another question,” he added, effectively hinting that BoP may have been the principal reason for its struggles, when asked about the specific objectives of the update.

The 2026 aero package has already been spied out in the wild, during a two-day test at Circuit Paul Ricard in the south of France in recent weeks. There, all six full-time Toyota factory drivers (who have been retained for 2026) – plus TGR junior Esteban Masson – sampled the upgrade as part of a back-to-back comparison with the 2025-spec model.

“We started developing it back in 2024,” Floury said. “On track in Paul Ricard, our target was to quantify what we are doing. We had a reasonably good session, we had good conditions, pretty stable and did a lot of running. We are limited in the number of test days we can have. We would always love to do more, but we were lucky with the conditions we had.”

Floury also gave his take on the potential addition of Success Handicap rules to the Hypercar class to help balance the field, which the FIA has included in the 2026 regulations as a potential new tool for the rulemakers to use.

“Clearly, we’ve seen that what we have this year (with BoP) is not working,” he said. “Definitely, a success handicap is a tool available to try to improve it. It needs to be considered. To make a final decision, we need to run many simulations.

“At the moment, we have not started in-depth discussions about it. We need to find a system where we don’t only talk about this, and we go back to talking about racing.”

After much deliberation, the Hypercar manufacturers voted over the summer to keep Balance of Performance in play for the foreseeable future. Still, another new system is set to be implemented next year as the rulemakers continue to evaluate a way forward that draws less criticism from teams, media and fans. 

“The exact details of the performance balancing process will be determined before the first timed session of the Prologue, the official pre-season test, which is set to take place at Lusail International Circuit one week before the 2026 season-opening Qatar 1812 km race,” the FIA and ACO said in a joint statement sent to RACER ahead of Bahrain.

“The 2026 performance balancing process is being developed with full transparency and in close collaboration with the manufacturers involved in WEC’s Hypercar class.”