Motorsport: Relief for Sébastien Buemi

Two years ago, the Vaudois had the fastest car in all the world championship rounds, but in the most important race of the year an avoidable accident by Nicolas Lapierre in a downpour in the third hour ruined everything. After a time-consuming repair and making up ground from third last place, the 24-hour race ended in third place for Buemi. Even though a podium finish at Le Mans is always special, it was a huge disappointment for him.

After last year's dry spell, Sébastien Buemi has a fast car in his hands again this year with the new Toyota TS050 with a 2.4-L V6 turbo engine and most recently had his eyes on his first victory since the end of 2014 at the Spa 6 Hours before the same engine defect occurred as previously with the other car: "That had to do with the enormous forces in the Eau-Rouge dip, but we won't find them at Le Mans. After the race we returned to Spa for testing and no longer had the problem."

No car drove more test kilometers than the Toyota
Toyota completed eight endurance runs, some of them longer than 24 hours but with interruptions during the night, in preparation for the marathon. On the test day on June 5, no team covered more kilometers with one or both cars, which indicates major progress in terms of reliability. From the best times and the ideal time based on the best sectors, Toyota was indeed behind Audi and Porsche. But before Sébastien Buemi was able to chase times on soft tires at the end of the test program, the car was prematurely stopped due to an accident. Sébastien Buemi: "This year, the race will not be decided by pure speed. One will perhaps be half a second or a whole second faster than the other. But that doesn't allow for any big mistakes. Whoever is in the garage the least will win."

AutoSprintCH will once again offer a live ticker for the exciting race on Saturday and Sunday, so you can keep up to date with all the action at a glance.

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Photos: Toyota Motorsport