“Please make sure that tomorrow’s headlines don’t read: ‘Toyota finally returns to F1’,” implored the company’s CEO Akio Toyoda as he announced their new tie-up with Haas today.
The Japanese car making giant is back in F1 for the first time since it pulled the plug on its works team at the end of 2009. But its new alliance with Haas is a much more modest engagement with the sport than its previous attempt to the conquer the championship in the noughties.
Toyota’s first spell in F1 yielded no championship hardware but many hard lessons. They quit 15 years ago after eight seasons during which they failed to take even a single grand prix victory.
While few major manufacturers will ever pluck up the money, resources or the courage to compete at the highest level of motorsport as it is, even fewer will have learned quite as many lessons about how difficult it truly is to succeed at that level than Toyota.
As the last millennium was entering its dying years, one of the automotive industry’s true giants was plotting to make the next millennium theirs.
As early as October 1998, Toyota president Hiroshi Okuda went public about the manufacturer’s ambitions to join the world championship. However, on December 22nd 1999, Toyota’s seismic announcement that they had secured an agreement with the FIA to become the 12th entrant in Formula 1 forced the rest of the motorsport world to sit up and take notice.
Through their Germany-based Toyota Motorsport wing, and their factory in Cologne, Toyota had committed to joining fellow manufacturers Ferrari and Jaguar to become only the third full factory outfit in the world championship.
“The timing is right, the feel is right, and we are ready to go,” said Toyota Motorsport’s president Ove Andersson.
Six months later, Toyota laid out their stall. They would build their first car in the spring of 2001, spend an entire year privately testing it, before arriving on the grid in 2002 with 12 months’ of development to be competitive out of the gate. The following March, after the 11 teams on the existing grid had already completed the first two rounds of the championship, Toyota held an extraordinary launch event for their TF101 – a test car – with confirmed race driver Mika Salo and test driver Allan McNish.
Over the next 11 months, Toyota recorded thousands of laps with their test car around Paul Ricard, but also took the TF101 on tour to 11 of the 17 circuits that the team would be racing in 2002. In total, the team claimed to have racked up over 3,000 laps and almost 21,000km in the car – over twice as much distance as the majority of drivers covered over the 17 grands prix weekends in that year’s championship.
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In October, Toyota confirmed that 31-year-old McNish would join Salo in the team’s second seat for his rookie season. Ambitions only grew for Toyota’s step up to Formula 1 the following year. Unveiling the TF102, Toyota’s first ever F1 race car, before the end of 2001, the team said they had achieved the results they wanted from their development year.
“Our goal for next year is first to ‘learn,’ and second to be recognised as having been competitive,” said Andersson.
With points paid down only to the first six finishers back in 2002, merely scoring a point or two over their debut season would be an achievement. But when nine of the 22 cars – including McNish – were eliminated at the first corner of the team’s debut race in Albert Park, Salo managed to continue despite receiving a tap from his team mate at the start. Over the rest of an attrition-heavy race, Salo gradually moved up into sixth place, chasing down Mark Webber in the closing laps. Despite a late spin allowing Webber to beat him to fifth, Salo still scored the final point of the day in sixth to put Toyota on the board in their first ever grand prix.
Although a second point followed just two races later for Salo in Brazil, those were the only times Toyota scored all season. Despite the team taking 11 top-ten finishes from 34 starts, Toyota ultimately finished their first season tenth in the constructors’ championship and last of the ten teams to complete the year – Webber’s Australia result ensuring they were even beaten by minnows Minardi.
Needless to say, Toyota had expected more from their first foray into Formula 1 than what they had achieved. Although the TF103 for the 2003 season was more evolution than revolution on the technical side, it was piloted by an all-new driver line up of veteran Olivier Panis and ChampCar champion Christiano da Matta. Year two of the programme proved modestly more successful than the first, improving gradually through the year to score 16 points and take eighth in the championship. Highlights included Da Matta leading Toyota’s first ever laps of a grand prix in Silverstone, and scoring two points at the team’s home round in Suzuka, around rival Honda’s own circuit.
Progress continued to come slower than Toyota would have wanted as 2004 proved to be more of the same. Da Matta was replaced mid-season by fellow Brazilian Ricardo Zonta, before Renault refugee Jarno Trulli joined the team for the closing rounds. Toyota finished eighth once again – the lowest-ranked factory manufacturer team out of Ferrari, Renault, Jaguar and themselves. However, the team had abandoned development of their 2004 car following the 12th round in Germany to focus on the upcoming season and its revised regulations.
Toyota had gone to great lengths to sign Renault technical director Mike Gascoyne to improve their fortunes beyond 2004. The first chassis produced under his leadership, the TF105 in 2005, proved to be their most competitive yet. Ralf Schumacher joined Trulli for 2005, famously on a retainer so large it prompted some to ask whether Toyota thought they were signing his brother, though it gave the team a double race-winning driver line-up.
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The 2005 season was easily Toyota’s best so far and arguably their best year in the world championship. Trulli converted Toyota’s second consecutive front row start in Malaysia to their first podium finish with second place. He returned to the podium at the next round in Bahrain and again in Spain, before Schumacher scored two further top-three finishes for the team in Hungary and China at the end of the year.
Toyota also began to supply engines to customer teams for the first time in 2005, striking a deal with Jordan. That deal with the Silverstone-based outfit also continued into the following season when Jordan completed its transition into Midland.
Although Toyota had finally broken into the top half of the field for the first time, they fell out of it again over the next two seasons, failing to build on their momentum from such a successful season. Across 2006 and 2007, Toyota only appeared on the podium once, courtesy of Schumacher in the 2006 Australian Grand Prix. The team had spent many millions of dollars, had some truly state-of-the-art facilities – most notably their wind tunnel in Cologne – and had only enjoyed one moderately successful season.
Perhaps most frustratingly, their fierce Japanese motorsport rivals Honda had now also joined the grid as a full factory team, taking ownership of what was previously BAR. The first year of head-to-head competition could hardly have gone worse for Toyota, as not only did Honda soundly beat them in the constructors’ championship with more than double their points tally, but Honda also stormed to victory in Hungary with Jenson Button. This, the third grand prix victory for a Japanese factory team in history, achieved in 13 races what Toyota had failed to do in 83.
But while Honda had their win, Toyota had ‘won’ the Japanese Grand Prix from their rivals after successfully striking a deal to move the race from the Honda-owned Suzuka circuit to their own Fuji track for 2007 and 2008. However, after two events on an emasculated version of the course F1 previously visited in the seventies, the event returned to Suzuka.
There was some improvement in fortune for 2008. Trulli returned them to the podium with a third place finish in the French Grand Prix, with new team mate Timo Glock taking advantage of a poor race for Lewis Hamilton and a late retirement for race leader Felipe Massa to climb up to second place in Hungary after holding off Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari. Williams had also taken over from Midland as Toyota’s sole engine customers in a three year deal starting with the 2007 season – one that enabled them to put Toyota-supported Japanese talent Kazuki Nakajima in the team.
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But in the latter half of 2008, Formula 1, and indeed the world, was hammered by the global financial crisis. The impact of which was immediate in the paddock, with Honda suddenly deciding to pull out of F1 entirely at the end of the season. Despite posting a loss of over a billion pounds in 2008, Toyota’s then-president Katsuaki Watanabe reaffirmed their commitment to the sport in 2009, but admitted that continuing to fund their F1 activities at the same level would be “extremely difficult.”.
Toyota’s TF109 for the heavily revised regulations for 2009 was one of the team’s more successful efforts. Despite starting 19th on the grid, Trulli recovered to claim a podium at the season opener in Australia – although that only came after a penalty for overtaking under Safety Car was dropped after Hamilton was found to have lied to the race stewards. Further progress followed in Bahrain, where Trulli secured Toyota’s third F1 pole position. Although he could not convert it into that elusive first victory, Trulli still took Toyota’s third podium from the first four rounds of the season.
Although Toyota still came no closer to taking a win over the remainder of the season, Glock and Trulli each took one further podium in Singapore and Japan, respectively. After Glock was hurt in qualifying at Suzuka, Toyota handed a grand prix debut to 23-year-old Japanese driver Kamui Kobayashi. His immediate pace and remarkable racecraft in his first two races impressed many, suggesting he could potentially be the great homegrown talent that Toyota and Japan had always longed for.
However, any dreams Kobayashi had of potentially securing one of Toyota’s race seats for 2010 were shattered, as were the hopes for success of every member of the F1 team when, on November 4th, the Toyota Motor Corporation announced it would immediately withdraw from the sport, just days after the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi. Although Toyota insisted it wished to remain a competitor, the financial pressures of the time had led the company’s management to decide it simply was not worth the level of investment needed to continue.
Toyota’s time as a Formula 1 constructor ended after 140 grands prix, three pole positions, 13 podiums, 278.5 points, 14,363 racing laps – and zero victories. If Toyota had entered the world championship to prove they could go toe-to-toe with the very best in single-seaters, it is hard to say they were successful in that endeavour. Beyond their inability to win, their achievements – only three top-five placings in the constructors’ championship in eight years with a best of fourth – was a scant return for the enormous investment from the company on their F1 programme given the success other teams achieved with far less funding.
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Today Toyoda admitted a degree of regret about the failure of their first team. But tellingly, he said their inability to promote more drivers like Kobayashi bothered him the most.
“I think that, somewhere deep in his heart, that ordinary older car-loving guy Akio Toyoda had always regretted having blocked―by pulling out of F1―Japanese youths’ path toward driving the world’s fastest cars,” he said.
“That said, with the media watching my every step, I dare to add that I still believe my decision as the president of Toyota to withdraw from F1 was not wrong.”
“I would like to see the day when a Super Formula driver grips the steering wheels of the world’s fastest cars,” he added.
Although Toyota soon returned to the more familiar world of sports car racing in the World Endurance Championship and the Le Mans 24 Hours with an LMP1 programme that evolved into their current hypercar, Toyota still had to endure years of bitter defeat until they finally conquered Le Mans with the help of Fernando Alonso in 2018. And even then, their five consecutive triumphs only came when they were by far the strongest, best funded programme in their class.
On face value, teaming up with Haas, one of the most under-resourced teams on the grid with one of the lowest budgets to match, is unlikely to yield much better results. But Haas has shown flashes of overachievement over their nine years in the sport so far, just not the ability to maintain that momentum. If a tie-up with Toyota helps them to break out of their feast-and-famine cycle, then that in itself will be an achievement. But today’s announcement indicated Toyota have no appetite to return to full-scale competition in motorsport’s top flight.
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