Toyota set for new WRC attack

Toyota is about to double-down on the World Rally Championship. After dominating the elite Rally1 series in recent years with its Yaris Hybrid, it is about to unleash a new contender in the Rally2 category.

It is another Yaris, but vastly different from the tube-framed Rally1 prototype that runs a silhouette body and more than 375 kiloWatts of power from a combined 1.6-litre turbo engine and electrical booster package.

The Rally2 Yaris is much closer to the showroom car and very similar to the championship winning Toyotas developed in Canberra by Neal Bates Motorsport for the regional AP4 rules.

But this is a full factory Toyota effort, with input from the company’s traditional motorsport base in Cologne, Germany – once home to its Formula One team and now headquarters for its Le Mans sports car programs – and the rally team in Finland.

The Rally2 Yaris has been in development for more than a year and has been unveiled in the lead-up to the Monte Carlo Rally, the first leg of this year’s WRC series.

The key components are similar to other Rally2 front-runners from Ford and Skoda, the team to beat last year, with a 1.6-litre engine with 32-millimetre restrictor – good for around 225 kiloWatts – a five-speed sequential manual gearbox, all-wheel drive and a mandated weight of 1230 kilograms.

Development was centred in Europe, with Toyota Gazoo Racing’s team boss and retired WRC driver Yari-Matti Latvala, doing some of the driving. He also drove the car in last year’s Japanese leg of the WRC.

Five cars have been built in the first batch of Rally2 cars, with #1 reserved for the chairman of Toyota, Akio Toyoda. He is a keen motorsport competitor, who took Toyota into the WRC and even drove a Toyota 86 rally prototype once in Australia during Rally Australia in Coffs Harbour in 2014.

All of the available Rally2 cars will be competing in Monte Carlo, although Bates Motorsport has placed orders and is hoping to get its first factory Yaris sometime in 2024 for the national championship.

Pierre-Louis Loubet has done the most-recent testing for Toyota, in the lead-up to the Monte Carlo Rally, although the top-seeded Yaris Rally2 driver could be 22-year old Sami Pajari.

He lives in Jyvaskyla, traditional base for Rally Finland and also the location of the Toyota Gazoo rally team.

He won the Junior World Championship in 2021 and competed last year in a Skoda Fabia RS in Rally2

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 On the latest podcast, Bruce, PG and Andrew talk about their three motor racing highlights of 2023, and to balance it out… The three lowlights as well, not lowlifes Bruce!