Akio Toyoda comment for victories in the Spa-Francorchamps 6 Hours
All our efforts are on making ever-better cars and this means we aim to make cars, which are reliable and secure for the drivers, who can travel to their destination in a fun-to-drive way. For sports cars, speed and strength are even bigger priorities.
This year the FIA World Endurance Championship has introduced the Hypercar class, which is strongly related to high-end road going sports cars. To compete in that class, Toyota Gazoo Racing introduced a brand-new race car, the GR010 Hybrid.
Our challenge began this weekend with the opening round, the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, when two GR010 Hybrids took part.
During these first steps of in our journey, I feel the members involved in this project have started to show the potential speed and strength of the GR010 Hybrid.
In the qualifying session, taking place over just one lap, Kamui Kobayashi in car No7 demonstrated the speed of this car with an astonishing lap of 2:00.747. After starting from pole position, Mike, Kamui and José behind the wheel of car No7 finally finished 3rd on the podium following several setbacks, while Sébastien, Kazuki and Brendon, driving car No8, showed the strength of the GR010 Hybrid by winning the race after an exciting six hours.
During our very first race, nobody knew what would happen. I really would like to say thank you to all six drivers and the team members for raising our expectations about the big potential speed and strength of this car.
On the other hand, we must keep searching for more reliability and security, as well as more speed and strength; we must continuously improve these factors in the future because the season continues and the Le Mans 24 Hours is coming.
I would like all team members to continue this way of making cars that can keep running on any roads. And I would like to deliver the technology which has been developed and honed on this car to our customers.
To all our fans, thank you for your support and encouragement during our first round of WEC 2021. I hope you will be watching our journey of making ever-better cars with Toyota Gazoo. Thank you very much.
Akio Toyoda
Team Founder, Toyota Gazoo Racing.
