Gazoo's Grenade - Bringing World Rally To Your Garage

Bringing World Rally to your garage

- Pawan Dhingara

Climbing down from the lofty appeal of a Tesla Model S and Aspark Owl featured elsewhere on these pages is a little hatchback that proves that dynamite comes in small packages. It might not look like it on the surface but this once-friendly and common city hatchback has been transformed by Toyota’s Motorsport Division, Gazoo Racing, to be something of a giant killer.

To understand why this has happened during a time when the automotive world seems to be consolidating rather than funding skunkworks projects like this, one only needs to look over to motorsport. Toyota’s relatively new Gazoo Racing moniker is establishing itself in Endurance Racing, Off-road competition and World Rally - The latter is where the Toyota Yaris competes. Involvement in this incredibly expensive motorsport requires another outlet in order to make it viable; a place where all this development can be repurposed for mainstream and eventually sold. It’s a recipe that, at its most prolific in the 80s and 90s, produced some of the world’s most desirable, game-changing cars and the GR Yaris proves it still does!

This really shouldn’t surprise us. Toyota president, Akio Toyoda, is a keen racing driver. Back when the GT86 was launched he made a promise that the future of Toyota was going to be focused on building cars that are fun to drive. The GT86 and Supra certainly delivered - even the previous Yaris GRMN that was a sort of half-baked effort with a silly price was amazingly visceral to drive. Turns out, that was just the Au derve for what was to come.