Check out Toyota’s new GR Yaris Aero Package

Last year was a pretty good one for Gazoo Racing. It won three motorsport titles: the FIA World Rally Championship, the FIA World Endurance Championship, and FIA World Rally Raid Championship. That’s not bad going, is it? This year it’s going back to its roots, though. Akio Toyoda and Hiromu Naruse created Gazoo Racing in 2007, and, back then, they opted for the Nürburgring 24 Hours to prove their overriding philosophy: “roads build people, and people build cars”. Well, strictly speaking, it’s robots that actually build the cars, but you need good people with real passion and desire to make them covetable. Cars like the Toyota GR Yaris, for example.

It’s been six years since TGR was last at the Nürburgring, but in 2025 it’s going back – this time in conjunction with Rookie Racing, which is a privateer team. They’ll compete under the banner Toyota Gazoo Rookie Racing (TGRR) in the Nürburgring Langstrecken Series and the Nürburgring 24 Hours. They’ll also be running in the Super Taikyu series in Japan.

And all this is to push on with TGR’s ‘driver-first’ approach, which involves sticking products into the heat of competition and testing and breaking, testing and breaking… That’s the company’s take on how to make better road cars. For example, TGRR will be fielding a GR Yaris with Gazoo Racing’s new Direct Automatic Transmission. You can buy that ‘box in the GR Yaris road car, and it’s an innovative design. Eight, closely-stacked ratios for uninhibited acceleration, and fully automatic with ultra-fast downshifts that ‘allow the driver to focus more closely on steering, braking and acceleration’. The aim is to make it even better by stress-testing it on track.

Don’t fancy an auto? Well, how about the new GR Yaris Aero Package instead? This was also ‘born on the racetrack’ apparently, and also part of the ‘driver-first’ approach. You get a manually adjustable rear wing, and new vents behind the front and rear wheels to reduce pressure around the arches. The bonnet vent improves cooling, too, and while all this might realistically have – how shall we put this? – limited tangible benefits on the road, the upgrades make the GR Yaris look the dog’s danglers. And if that’s not enough to whet your appetite then the package also includes a vertical handbrake. I mean, come on. That’s got you salivating, hasn’t it?

There’s more, too. The new GR Supra A90 Final Edition comes with 441hp – a 101hp increase on the standard car – and torque boosted from 369lb ft to 421lb ft. That’s no ‘half-a-turn on the turbo and send it out the door’ job. As a result you’ll be staring at a speedo needle nudging 168mph if you’re flat out on the Autobahn en route to the ‘ring, to watch the racing. Other upgrades include adjustable KW suspension, steering that’s more direct, new 19-inch Brembo cross-drilled discs and wider, stickier rubber. And, presumably, they up the cornering force somewhat because there’s also a new carbon fibre seat to hold you in place.

And don’t forget that in the background is the GR Yaris M Concept that MB wrote about a couple of months back. For those that didn’t see it, this is the mid-engine Yaris with a 2.0-litre hybrid four pot being run in the Super Taikyu series. Again, the philosophy is: ‘if it ain’t broke, go back out again until it is’. The hybrid element adds very little weight and the short-stroke ICE is very compact, which is obviously advantageous for packaging. 

Autocar reports that the engine will make up to 400hp when it ends up in TGR road cars, with the reduced emissions allowing them to be built in bigger numbers in Europe than is possible with, say, the current GR Yaris. Now, the current Yaris is obviously front-engined, and while a mid-engined special for the road is possible, what else might Toyota be developing a mid-engine layout for? What in their back catalogue had its engine in the middle? Ah yes, the MR2. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.