Why Toyota’s 2026 WEC triumphs have put it into the all-time greatest endurance racing team debate

Feature WEC Barcelona Opinion Why Toyota’s 2026 WEC triumphs have put it into the all-time greatest endurance racing team debate Toyota wrapping up both WEC titles with a round to spare is a feat fitting of its extraordinary 2026 with four wins from seven rounds. While its 1-2 in the Barcelona 6 Hours was different to the other three victories, its success this year puts the Cologne-based squad firmly in the conversation about greatest endurance racing teams Gary Watkins Edited: Oct 20, 2026, 1:11 PM Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp Share on Linkedin Share on Pinterest Share on Viber Add as a preferred source The chips were down in Barcelona. It was a trip into uncharted waters for everybody: a hastily arranged fixture at a circuit where no one had significant testing experience and a new wet-weather tyre brought into play in Spain by some rain falling on the plain. Should we have been surprised that it was Toyota that came out on top, sweeping to a dominant 1-2 result? A loud and clear ‘no’ is the answer on the basis of what we’d seen this year in the World Endurance Championship.

Toyota Racing has been the stand-out Hypercar team over the course of the 2026 WEC so far. It’s not just that it has won four of the seven races to date to seal the Hypercar manufacturers’ crown with a round to go and put the drivers’ title beyond the reach of any of its rivals. Rather, it has been the manner of its victories. And in that respect the Barcelona 6 Hours on Sunday was an outlier.

Victories for the reworked TR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar at Imola, the Le Mans 24 Hours and Fuji were achieved when it didn’t have the fastest car, though at the French enduro it did have the upper hand in the all-important final hours. This time, the TR010 was in the ascendant. Everyone else was competing for third place.

As different as it might have been from the previous victories, Barcelona was another example of Cologne-based Toyota’s strengths as a team, its ability to think on its feet and to overcome problems. It got a handle on Michelin’s new wet tyre better than its rivals, even the ones that had some limited running on it. The fact that it hadn’t tested its LMH on the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, at least not in the current configuration since the Mickey Mouse final sequence was done away with, didn’t turn out to be much of a hindrance either. The aggressive track surface proved the opposite for a car that has always been light on its tyres.

As imperious as Toyota was last weekend, I’m not sure its runaway victory ranks quite as highly as its ability to overcome adversity at Le Mans back in June. It got a handle on the issue with the torque sensor on the winning #7 entry driven by Kamui Kobayashi, Nyck de Vries and Mike Conway and managed to fix a problem with one of the front brake cooling drums on #8 to get Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa home in third place. Subtract a fair chunk or even all the points garnered by the two Toyota crews at Le Mans and give WRT BMW drivers Rene Rast, Robin Frijns and Sheldon van der Linde a few more for winning the race rather than finishing second, and the chase for both WEC titles would be well and truly open going into next month’s Monza finale.

As important as the 24 Hours has been in its championship-winning season, Le Mans hasn’t been my favourite Toyota moment so far this season. I enjoyed the tactical masterclass it put on back in April to beat Ferrari in its backyard at Imola on a day when the Italian machine was the faster car, but the events of Fuji in September made me say to myself, ‘Yeah, this is a top-notch team operating right at the top of its game.’

Toyota took an informed gamble in Japan on how long the final safety car was going to last and therefore how much fuel was going to be required to get to the finish. What was most definitely a bit of a punt propelled the #8 car from down the order to the lead of the race and also the championship. The follow-up victory in Barcelona for #8 means that Buemi, Hartley and Hirakawa are overwhelming favourites to beat their team-mates to the title at Monza.

Toyota’s 2021 Le Mans triumph was a standout moment

This all got me thinking about other magic moments for Toyota in the years since it joined the WEC two races late in the inaugural season of the reborn world championship in 2012. One has to be the way it came up with a series of fixes to overcome the fuel filter issues at Le Mans 2021 in the first year of what was then known as the GR010. They included getting the drivers to turn the fuel pumps on and off multiple times a lap — not the flick of a switch but a complicated scroll through the dash controls — and writing and installing new software for the engine controls during the course of the race.

Fuji 2016, with the TS050 HYBRID LMP1, also deserves to be mentioned. Victory for Kobayashi, Conway and Stephane Sarrazin was secured courtesy of a clever strategic call (like Imola) that came at the end of the race (like Fuji).

Another Toyota victory I remember with pleasure its Le Mans 2018, its long overdue first victory in the big one in France. Sure, we all knew the TS050 HYBRID, barring some seismic event, was going to win that one after the withdrawal of first Audi and then Porsche left it as the last manufacturer standing in LMP1. But it was a no holds barred battle between the two Japanese marque’s two cars. It was edge of your set stuff at times as Buemi, Fernando Alonso and Kazuki Nakajima prevailed. It’s a shame that the event is remembered for the victory by a visiting Formula 1 legend rather than a fantastic race in which Toyota chose not to hold its drivers back when victory looked assured even before the lights went out.

The time has come to put the team up on a pedestal and talk about the boys and girls from Cologne in the same breath as Joest Racing

I am increasingly of the opinion that Toyota Racing, which for a while carried the word Gazoo in its name, has to be regarded as one of the all-time great endurance racing teams. There’s a tendency to overlook the in-house manufacturer operations when lists of such are compiled. Joest Racing is a shoo-in on any list of the top 10 list: it has to be with, depending on how you count them, 15, 16 or 17 Le Mans victories to its name. There are generally places for JW Automotive and Tom Walkinshaw Racing, too. You might chuck in WRT these days given its successes in the GT3 arena first with Audi and now BMW. It’s probably one big win with the Munich marque’s M Hybrid V8 LMDh away from having a guaranteed spot.

But Porsche’s factory team run from the manufacturer’s research and development campus at Weissach is often left out. That’s despite 14 Le Mans wins in four separate decades, not forgetting multiple world championship titles. (Just so you know, I’m counting the two wins at La Sarthe for the 917 under the Salzburg and Martini banners on that list because the winning car in 1970 and ’71 was each time most definitely operated out of Weissach.)

In the same way, I reckon Toyota has been overlooked. Perhaps that’s because, it originally raced with support from ORECA (which is where current technical director David Floury came from). But I think the time has come to put the team up on a pedestal and talk about the boys and girls from Cologne in the same breath as Joest Racing. The 2026 season has convinced me of that.

Toyota has entered the conversation about greatest endurance team among the likes of Porsche and Joest

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Author Gary Watkins Gary Watkins has, for reasons best known to himself, devoted all his working life to covering sportscar racing. This season is his 33rd as a motorsport journalist, during which time he has reported on major long-distance events on four continents and approaching 80 24-hour races. He reckons a degree in political philosophy makes him well qualified for covering the sometimes Machiavellian world of international sportscars.

Gary, who also writes for Motor Sport, Autocourse, RACER and others, lives in Surbiton close to the former workshops of the Cooper Formula 1 team but spends more time on the road than at home for most of the year.

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