By Anthony Rees
GR Yaris dominated the 2020 Tokyo Auto Salon, stirring up an outcry in North America over its absence. A radical hot hatch, GR Yaris is equipped with an all-new 268-horsepower, turbocharged 3-cylinder engine; a rally-derived GR-FOUR All-Wheel Drive system; and a track-proven suspension. It's the same engineering that helped to make TOYOTA GAZOO Racing a dominant force in the World Rally Championship. While GR Yaris isn't coming to the U.S., perhaps it's time the U.S. got a Toyota hot hatch to call its own. And one that can only come from TOYOTA GAZOO Racing.
The Toyota Yaris GR isn't a roadgoing WRC car, but it does get impressively close, having been created by Gazoo Racing, Toyota's in-house motorsports arm. We drove the Yaris GR in England, on damp and twisty roads almost perfectly suited to demonstrating the talents of this all-wheel-drive hot hatch. Sadly, there are no plans to bring the Yaris GR to the United States. In an ironic twist of fate—given its reason for being—the one thing the Yaris GR will miss is a competition-spec sibling. Toyota's 2021 WRC entrant was set to be based on the Yaris GR, but COVID-19 caused testing to be halted.
A Toyota hot hatch, if you want to hugely downplay it. This is called homologation and although your rally car can deviate from the road formula in many areas, in some key ones it can’t. Because what Toyota has done is design a rally car from the ground up. OK, it’s still a compromise, but the compromise here isn’t happy shopper meets WRC, it’s hot hatch meets WRC. So how much of it is shared with the standard Yaris?
If you have been contacted about a Toyota recall, or have reason to believe your vehicle may be included in a recall, you can quickly find out more by using our 3-step Recall Checker below. For some people, Hybrid technology still is thought of as new technology. In fact, even though our first Hybrid, the Prius, was on the roads ahead of its time in 1997, we’ve actually been honing our Hybrid know-how since the mid 1970s.
The 2021 Toyota GR Yaris (GR is the abbreviation for Gazoo Racing) made its anticipated debut on Friday and my, oh, my, it's quite the proper hot hatchback. From those three cylinders and turbo, this little dude makes a whopping 268 horsepower. The GR Yaris is a three-door body style made from carbon-fiber polymer and aluminum to keep weight off. The platforms used for the car aren't found in the US, as we make do with a rebadged Yaris model here. In sum, "The GR Yaris is based on the European-spec Yaris and there is no plan to offer that vehicle here in the US," a Toyota representative told Roadshow.
The 2021 Toyota GR Yaris rights those wrongs. The GR Yaris spawned from this humble base, and yet has become so much more. The base model Yaris wasn’t exactly what you'd call "rally-spec," and Gazoo Racing, Toyota’s performance arm, had certain needs it couldn’t meet. If there’s one thing that stands out about the GR Yaris, it’s how familiar it feels right away. As far as daily duties go, however, the GR Yaris is surprisingly capable of behaving itself when necessary.
The Toyota Yaris (Japanese: トヨタ ・ヤリス, Toyota Yarisu) is a subcompact car sold by Toyota since 1999, replacing the Starlet and Tercel. Toyota has used the "Yaris" name on export versions of various Japanese-market models, with some markets receiving the same vehicles under the Toyota Echo name through 2005. In North America, most Yaris sedan models marketed from 2015 and most Yaris hatchback models marketed from 2019 are rebadged versions of the Mazda2 that are produced and developed by Mazda for Toyota. The "Yaris" name is derived from "Charis", the singular form of Charites, the Greek goddesses of charm and beauty. [1] For the fourth generation model, the "Yaris" name is used worldwide, including Japan, which replaces the "Vitz" name.
You’ll have come across the Toyota Yaris before; a dependable and unassuming supermini seen pootling around towns, running errands and patiently waiting in supermarket car parks all over the nation in large numbers every day. To be clear, the car we’re talking about here – the Toyota GR Yaris – is not one of these. ToyotaWith this kind of lineage then, the £30,000 Yaris GR is carrying a lot of hype and is prone to causing heart tremors in people who formally identify as ‘revhead’. There’s the option to switch to Sport mode where 70 per cent of the power is delivered straight to the rear wheels for added slide potential. Sign up to our newsletter to get more delivered straight to your inbox.
