The 94C-V was not a new car in the conventional sense. Toyota had campaigned the same two chassis at Le Mans in 1992 as the 92C-V, then updated and renamed them the 93C-V for the 1993 race, where Roland Ratzenberger drove the number 22 car to a fifth-place overall finish. For 1994, with Group C abolished and the Le Mans organisers introducing LMP classification, Toyota updated the cars again and ran them as the 94C-V under the new LMP1 category. The arrangement showed both the durability of the basic platform and Toyota's pragmatic approach to the transition between regulatory eras.
The 1994 entry was marked from the outset by tragedy. Roland Ratzenberger, who had driven for Toyota at Le Mans the previous year, was killed during qualifying for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix weekend before the Le Mans event. His name was nonetheless left on the number 1 car as a tribute, with Eddie Irvine substituting as his replacement alongside Mauro Martini and Jeff Krosnoff. The second car, running as the Nisso-94C-V with number 4, was driven by Steven Andskär, George Fouché, and Bob Wollek.
In the early stages, Toyota's preparations appeared insufficient against the opposition. The test day on 8 May was skipped, and the Courage C32 proved comparable in qualifying trim. Despite this, the number 1 car — entered as the SARD-94C-V — ran strongly in the race and at one point led by a full lap with ninety minutes remaining. The familiar pattern of late Toyota failures then asserted itself: transmission problems forced the leading car into the pits and cost it the overall lead. A sequence of late-race mechanical failures at Le Mans would become something that commentators and insiders referred to as a curse on the Toyota program, one that would not be broken until the manufacturer's first overall victory in 2018.
Eddie Irvine closed the gap after the transmission issue was resolved, but the car ultimately finished second overall, one lap behind the winning Dauer 962 Le Mans. Mauro Martini had qualified the number 1 car fourth overall and third in the LMP1 class. The number 4 car, driven by Andskär, Fouché, and Wollek, qualified eighth overall and fifth in LMP1 and finished fourth overall, sixteen laps behind the winner. For the third consecutive year, Toyota achieved a class 1-2 finish at Le Mans, a remarkable streak across three successive regulatory configurations.
The 94C-V also appeared at the 1994 1000 km of Suzuka, driven by Mauro Martini and Jeff Krosnoff. The car retired from that event following damage sustained in an accident.
The 94C-V closed the chapter on Toyota's first sustained Le Mans assault. The three-year 92C-V/93C-V/94C-V lineage produced class victories in each of its Le Mans appearances while falling just short of overall victory, a gap that became emblematic of Toyota's Le Mans story through the late 1990s and 2000s. The 1994 second-place overall — with Ratzenberger's name on the car — remains one of the more poignant results in the race's history.