Toyota GR86 wins Index of Performance at Nine-Hours of Kyalami

Stick to the target lap time and don’t crash for nine hours.

That was the basic brief as we lined up for last Saturday’s Nine-Hours of Kyalami in a Toyota GR86 coupé. After competing against them in this year’s Toyota GR Cup championship, I teamed up with rival motoring journalists Setshaba Mashigo (ASAMM), Mark Jones (The Citizen) and Chad Lückhoff (AutoTrader) in the Southern African Endurance Series’ (SAES) season finale.

A second Toyota GR86 was entered with Toyota managers Anand Pather, Riaan Esterhuysen and Mario de Sousa, and motoring journalist Brendon Staniforth (Maroela Media).

Our almost stock-standard 2.4l Toyotas were among the slowest cars on a grid contested by fire-spitting Lamborghinis, Porsches and purpose-built racers, so the goal was to do well in the Index of Performance category which Toyota had won with a GR Yaris at last year’s Killarney Nine-Hour.

What allowed our David cars to compete against the Goliaths was an Index system enabling vehicles with varying performance to compete on an equal basis. It rewards consistency, and our team manager Freddie Pretorius set us a target lap time of 2 minutes 20 seconds which we were to stick to as closely as possible over the nine hour race.

This was slower than we’d done in qualifying but endurance racing is not about driving flat out as in a sprint, but about lapping swiftly while preserving tyres and brakes and bringing the car home in one piece. The motorsport adage “to finish first, first you have to finish” is never more appropriate than in an endurance race.

Our cars had larger fuel tanks which Pretorius had fitted at his Fast Development workshop at Zwartkops raceway, where he had prepared our GR86 race cars all season. This meant we could run our Toyotas for longer stints and make fewer pit stops than the fuel-sucking supercars that shared the grid with us.

The plan was for each of us to do a single stint of two hours and 15 minutes so we’d have only three scheduled pit stops to swap drivers and fill up with fuel. If there were no mechanical problems or unexpected maladies we’d be in good stead to win the Index award.

Stick to the target lap time and don’t crash for nine hours. No problem.

Complicating matters was that the fastest cars in class A were up to 40 seconds quicker than our class D Toyotas and would pass us every three or four laps, so we’d need to be sharp and stay out of their way as they streaked past. Even trickier was not getting tangled up with the powerful Cobras which were faster than our Toyota in a straight line but didn’t handle as well, so after diving past they’d hold us up in the corners.

As expected we qualified near the back of the 44-car grid, right behind a clump of Cobras, and Jones took the first stint when the race started sunny and dry at noon on Saturday.

The Citizen man stuck to the brief and posted the required lap times while staying out of trouble, and I took over at around 2.15pm in the first pit stop, which went smoothly. It took around three minutes for the pit crew to refuel the car, which gave me plenty of time to adjust the seat, tighten the four-point racing harness and plug in my helmet comms —  we were in radio contact with the pits for the race duration.

It took a few laps to get used to setting the required pace but I got into the groove and started posting regular 2min20 lap times.

Shortly after the stint began a broken-down race car on the circuit brought out the safety car and we bunched up behind it for a few laps. When the safety car peeled off and the race resumed there were a few moments of excitement as the faster cars behind zoomed past me left and right.

The rule when there is such a big performance difference between racing cars is to stick to your line and let the faster cars find their way past, but some supercars blitzed us in unexpected places and forced us off the clean racing line onto the slippery “marbles” formed by dried blobs of tyre rubber. The brief was to stay out of trouble and we always gave the lapping cars a gap, but the trick was to not lose too much time doing it and compromising our lap times.

You don’t get bored in a race but as the stint wears on your concentration can waver, so I focussed on getting as close as I could to nailing an exact 2min20 lap time.

Then I got the call to pit and just like that my stint was over. I peeled into the pitlane making sure not to exceed the 60km/h speed limit and helped our third driver, Lückhoff, get strapped into my sweaty race seat.

I’d never raced such a long stint before and had wondered how two hours-plus would affect me physically and mentally. I experienced a little back pain in the hard racing seat towards the end of the stint but otherwise felt fine during the extended drive and could have stayed out longer.

The first two stints had been in the dry but soon after Lückhoff started, a storm hit and caused several cars to slide off the wet circuit, leading to the safety car being deployed again. Our team mate kept it on the black stuff and when the rain stopped he set about metronomically churning out the required lap times on a dry circuit.

Mashigo, this year’s Toyota GR Cup champion, took the final and most difficult stint with the last two hours run in the dark with intermittent rain. We watched nervously from the pits as the clock ticked towards the 9pm finish and mishaps befell other competitors, some of whom had to retire. But Mashigo kept it clean in the tricky conditions and there was great relief when he took the long-awaited chequered flag.

The GR86 ran like a Swiss watch over 213 laps and 965km of racing and everything went according to plan. We’d run the whole nine hours on one set of tyres and brake pads, had no unscheduled pit stops, and the car didn’t have a scratch.

The car's reliability and keeping cool heads paid off. We received the good news: we’d won the Index of Performance award while the second GR86 was third, and both Toyota teams tasted champagne on the podium.