Toyota GR Series

 In the last four years, Toyota has unveiled three new models that have set fresh benchmarks for affordable and desirable performance.

The powerful head-turning Toyota GR Toyota Supra, the advanced 5-star review-scoring Toyota GR Yaris hot hatch and the incoming Toyota GR86 sportscar each sit at the apex of their class. And apex is perhaps the perfect word, as all three come from a performance division that truly epitomises a race-bred track-to-road philosophy: Toyota GAZOO Racing.

Toyota GAZOO Racing was born in 2007 to build on Toyota’s 60 years of motorsport engineering experience, and put it back at the heart of the performance car segment.

In the decades since Toyota first entered its iconic Toyota GT2000 in Japanese sportscar events, Toyota’s race teams have built an impressive array of success in Formula 1, 24-hour sportscar racing, US oval racing and rallying. As Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda said: “To test the durability and performance of cars, companies ought to participate in auto races. Such races must not be regarded as a simple matter of curiosity. They are indispensable.”

Today, Toyota GAZOO Racing’s teams tackle a broad array of challenges – from the 220mph speeds and gruelling twice-around-the-clock endurance test of the Le Mans 24 Hours and the Nürburgring 24 Hours, through the snow, gravel, mud and asphalt-covered public roads of the World Rally Championship, to the searing heat and rough-and-tumble of desert rally raid in the Dakar Rally.

Working directly alongside the race and rally teams, Toyota GAZOO Racing’s road car engineers have taken this race-honed knowledge and experience to design a new breed of ‘ever better’ GR Series sports cars and hot hatches that generate real passion and must-have halo desire among true performance enthusiasts.

But, why GAZOO? Well, it all stems from the early days of the internet, and a Toyota e-commerce site for used cars – named gazoo.com after the Japanese word for picture (‘gazo’). Toyota’s engineers used ‘Gazoo’ to describe all of their uniquely different performance cars, each sitting in individual ‘garages’. So, when Toyota was looking to brand its new performance arm, GAZOO Racing was the obvious choice.