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
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,
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BEST BUYS BMW M CARS
THE PERFORMANCE CAR LANDSCAPE WOULD HAVE looked very different over the last five decades without BMW. Its M division, founded in 1972, has produced some of the best driver’s cars ever to hit the road, and in the process has provided a stream of benchmark models for its rivals to chase. In recent years, stricter emissions regulations, downsizing and electrification have seen some of those rival cars falter, yet by and large BMW’s M machines have remained strong. In fact, some rank among the greatest the department has made think of the eCoty-winning M2 CS and M5 CS while others are the only options worth recommending in their respective segments. Price tags have risen with performance, however, putting those latest offerings out of reach for many, but the marque’s popularity means there are numerous earlier M models available on the second-hand market for far more attainable figures. Here are four of our favourites.
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