Pascal Vasselon, Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director, described the opening two days of the Spa 6 Hours meeting “as not our best race weekend so far”, despite Kamui Kobayashi taking pole position in the #7 Toyota GR010 HYBRID.
Vasselon explained that the lack of running for its pair of Le Mans Hypercars during the trio of free practice sessions will compromise its race.
“Starting from Free Practice 1, we lost quite a bit of time because of a system issue,” he said.
“This has really put us on the back foot.
“This year the tyres are so different compared with last year’s [as a result on the ban on pre-heating] that only the test sessions with the 2023 rubber matter and we did not test here.
“We needed to run here and because of this issue in FP1 and the high number of red flags [through free practice] we could not run much somehow.”
Michelin has been granted permission to supply all three 2023 specifications of slick tyre at Spa rather than the two normally made available to the Hypercar teams for a regular WEC round.
Vasselon said that Toyota remained “short of mileage to make an educated tyre choice” between the different specs for the race.
Hartley’s accident on his outlap in qualifying in the #8 Toyota will result in a compromised tyre strategy for the car he shares with Sebastien Buemi and Ryo Hirakawa, according to Vasselon.
Source: Autosport