Better late than never and all that. After four years of the aftermarket desperately trying to sate customer demand for wilder Yaris GRs, from big turbos to sequential gearboxes, Toyota is to offer Gen1 GR customers a dealer-fit, fully warrantied software upgrade. It isn’t one for those after huge gains, but looks like a nice concession for those who were unable to get a Gen2 (or couldn’t justify the price hike).
It’s been emailed to customers (thanks ecsrobin for the heads up), pitched as a ‘software update not to be ignored.’ For £995, the while-you-wait update brings another 14lb of torque – from 266lb ft to 280lb ft – bringing the original much closer to the 288lb ft Gen2 in terms of pulling power. It also offers up more configurability from the rest of the package, with Light and Heavy steering modes offered as well as Original, Quick and Control throttle ‘personalised throttle settings’. Presumably quite a lot has been directly translated from the Japanese release, a market that has had this upgrade available for a while.
It sounds like there are even more possibilities with the GR-FOUR all-wheel drive introduced also, with 55:45 and 45:55 mentioned alongside the default 60:40, Track that split it equally and 30:70 in Sport. ‘Born directly from our participation in motorsports’, reads the email, which has long been the promise of Gazoo Racing road cars, ‘the upgrade delivers more engine torque for enhanced driveability and more personalised driver settings, letting you tailor your car’s handling and controls to your driving style.’ Whether you’ll be able to tell the difference between a 60:40 torque split and a 55:45 one remains to be seen, of course, but dealer fit, manufacturer backed performance upgrades sound like great news to us. It’s almost like the good old days of Mountune fast Fords.
The GR Yaris warranty is unaffected, and CO2 is unchanged as well. According to our forum intel, the package is going to be offered at 10 GR centres from next week. We’ll do some digging to find out exactly what’s what – and hopefully drive an upgraded car too, of course. This news surely makes those £25k early cars look all the more alluring…