Toyota Yaris GRMN

In a bid to create a link between its WRC car and road-going line-up, Toyota has developed a low-volume, slightly unhinged 210bhp version of the Yaris. We drive a near production-ready prototype

- Adam Towker

YOSHINORI SASAKI, THE CHIEF ENGINEER ON YARIS GRMN, tells a lovely story about the birth of Toyota’s first hot hatch for at least a generation. During the  GT86 project, for which he was assistant chief engineer to Tetsuya Tada, he and Tada were testing said coupe in Wales when a small hot hatch latched onto their tail. ‘I don’t know what car it was, a Clio, a Polomaybe, but I drove faster and faster and still couldn’t shake them off,’ says Sasaki. ‘Whenwe finally got to a village we realised it was old lady driving. I said right then [laughing], we must make just such a car!’

It’s an unintentional reminder that Toyota’s recent history isn’t exactly crammed with classic hot hatches. But now we have ‘new’ Toyota. It may have taken a while for bossman Akio Toyoda’s enthusiasm for performance cars to filter down through the ranks, but this Yaris – which will be the first GRMNmodel to go on sale in Europe, the sixth in Japan –won’t stand alone, as there’s the spiritual successors to the Supra and theMR2 to look forward to at the very least. GRMN, by the way, stands for ‘Gazoo Racing tuned by Meister of the Nürburgring’. We kid you not.

It’s at the Ring, specifically Toyota’s test garage there, where we meet a pre-production Yaris GRMN and the small team behind the project. Toyota sees this car as a bridge between the WRC Yaris and the current road-going models, a bit of good old fashioned leveraging, if you like, in a modern era where limited homologation requirements mean we’re starved of competition bred machinery for the road. Alas, being front-wheel drive the Yaris GRMN has little in common with the WRC entry. It’s also soon clear that this is not a car to make a profit on,