Toyota breaks its racing cars so that its road cars don’t suffer the same fate
Paul Barker was impressed with how Toyota test things to breaking point and then puts them back together better
Sometimes in this business you meet people whose enthusiasm for developing cars that people will love makes you smile.
Last week, I spent a day with Toyota and Lexus at their annual event, where they wheel out their latest shiny new things. There’s plenty going on, largely around electrification, but the point was repeatedly made that consumers need to choose the best powertrain, rather than being forced into tech they’re not ready to adopt. Or “carbon emissions are the enemy, not any particular type of technology”, as Toyota’s European boss Matt Harrison put it.
But while new and updated mainstream Toyotas are interesting, plenty about the company’s character came out during its session on the GR brand in particular. It’s not that normal for companies to be so willing to talk about their cars breaking. However, the key message from its motorsport programme – across disciplines including world rally, off-road rally raid and endurance championships – is that Toyota races to test things to breaking point, and then puts them back together better.
Tech transfer via motorsport is nothing new, but to be so open and make the link to road cars so clear is less common. And the straight line between Toyota’s learnings on the track and improvements on the cars we buy bodes well.
But my favourite moment was the answer to a question posed during an engaging chat with Hiroyuki Yamada, GR project general manager and the man tasked with keeping the performance brand doing the things that have made it such a smash hit in recent years, primarily with the epic GR Yaris.
He’d been dragged away from developing a new 2.0-litre engine for future GR models to come and chat to Europe’s media, and I asked if he felt more pressure working on future cars following the Yaris’s phenomenal success.
“I started working for Toyota and working in the car industry because I love cars, and I feel greater pressure in keeping the field of play for the true car lovers around the world,” came Yamada’s response. If the people developing the next generation of iconic yet affordable performance cars see themselves as guardians of these vehicles on behalf of drivers worldwide, that feels like a good thing to me.
