For the past three years, Toyota has been the dominant force in the World Rally Championship, sweeping aside the opposition to win a stunning drivers’ and manufacturers’ treble. But this year the Japanese marque is taking on a new challenge and has entered the Rally2 customer sphere with the GR Yaris Rally2 – “the aggressive sibling of the GR Yaris Rally1”, according to Toyota WRC team technical director Tom Fowler.
Rally2 cars are to rallying what GT3 and TCR cars are to GT and touring car racing; off-the-shelf vehicles built to specific FIA regulations available to anyone who can stump up €200,000-€300,000. Rally2 regulations have been overwhelmingly successful since the birth of the ruleset under the R5 name in 2012, with 1500 of these four-wheel-drive, 1.6-litre cars on the market. Rally2 is the base for most national championships, the European Rally Championship’s top level, and WRC’s second tier: WRC2.
To ensure it hit the ground running against opposition from Skoda’s Fabia RS, Citroen’s C3, M-Sport Ford’s Fiesta and the Hyundai i20 N, Toyota conducted 18 months of development on the GR Yaris Rally2 and logged more than 9000 miles of testing between Kalle Rovanpera, Juho Hanninen, Stephane Lefebvre and Toyota team boss Jari-Matti Latvala.
While Toyota’s GR Yaris Rally1 is the WRC’s proven yardstick, winning 16 of 28 rallies it has contested to date, building a car to defined regulations specifically for customers of varying abilities is an altogether different task.
“The biggest challenge is getting the focus of the project correct because it’s a customer project that is out for sale,” Fowler explains. “It’s the first car we’ve designed like that as a company.
“In the past, our customer was only our factory driver, so we could easily understand what the need of the project was because the drivers are there with us. Now the driver could be anyone, so we had to really understand the focus and how to approach that.
Pajari has the best WRC result to date aboard the GR Yaris Rally2, with second in Sweden
Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool
“The regulation has been around for so long and there are lots of evolutions of all the other cars – it’s a very competitive market to come into. Everything has to work really well to match what everyone else has done as all the other cars are so good. Our first one has to be almost evo 3 or 4 straight away. That’s not just…
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