TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team (TGR-WRT) is pleased to confirm that the GR Yaris Rally2 has been officially granted homologation by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) from January 1, 2024.
TOYOTA GAZOO Racing (TGR) has up to now been participating in the FIA World Rally Championship [WRC] with the GR Yaris Rally1 hybrid, the FIA World Endurance Championship [WEC] with the GR010 hybrid and the FIA World Rally Raid Championship [W2RC] with the DKR Hilux EVO T1U as works motorsport activities, and has also developed the GR Supra GT4 to promote the making of ‘ever better cars’ through customer motorsports activity.
The GR Yaris Rally2 has been developed for customer rallying.
Chairman Akio Toyoda, known also as ‘Morizo’, hopes this will be the car to make the first step in building a bridge between motorsport vehicles and production vehicles through rally competition – something that could contribute to enhancing the rally market worldwide.
With the granting of the homologation certificate, distribution of the GR Yaris Rally2 can now begin to customers all over the world. The commemorative first car is scheduled to be delivered to ROOKIE Racing, led by Morizo, while four teams are set to participate in Rallye Monte-Carlo from January 25-28 with the GR Yaris Rally2.
The first four-wheel drive sports car to be developed exclusively by Toyota for 20 years, the GR Yaris was created by TGR with a mission to win in the WRC. Rather than a car made for TGR to win, the GR Yaris Rally2 is a car made for customers to win: this is the start of our new challenge.
The car made its public debut at Rally Japan in 2022, when Morizo took the wheel and measured its performance. Since then, we received a lot of feedback from the many drivers who have tested the Rally2 car on different surfaces and in different conditions. More than 15,000 competition kilometres have been covered, including participation in the Japanese Rally Championship which also served as testing on Japanese roads.
The development process has incorporated feedback from top professional drivers, young up-and-coming drivers and experienced customer drivers. Moving forward, an even wider range of feedback will be gathered from customer motorsport competitors in championships such as WRC, helping to develop improvements to make an ever better car.