Why do they insist on a H2 ICE instead of fuel cells? Fuel cells have better thermal efficiency and thus fewer pit stops over the course of the race. It's also much easier to scale up the power
It must be the same reason that they've been racing cars with experimental hydrogen ICE engines in Japan for the last few years, first with gaseous hydrogen and then with liquid hydrogen. I will give Akio Toyoda full credit for this move. Aside from the obvious which is that this improves Toyota's hydrogen know-how, the real bombshell that so far Toyota is keeping pretty quiet about is that this has enabled Toyota to achieve some major breakthroughs in fundamental ICE engineering. The engineering challenges of racing with a hydrogen ICE engine are very extreme, especially with liquid hydrogen. Dealing with these very extreme engineering challenges apparently taught Toyota some unique secrets and breakthroughs about ICE engineering and internal combustion that can be applied to their production ICE engines. The word is that these secrets and breakthroughs may be being applied to their next-generation ICE engines. A clue is that their next-generation ICE engines can run on a variety of fuels supposedly with no modifications.
Since the Akio Toyoda era, I have learned not to get too excited about any hype from Toyota. So if, and this is a BIG IF, Toyota actually applies the unique secrets and breakthroughs they have learned from racing hydrogen ICE engines fully to their production next-generation ICE engines then we might see something really special. We can only hope and pray that these secrets and breakthroughs do not remain exclusive only to Toyota's race cars.
