Toyota Australia planning GR Festivals

Toyota is plotting a rampant expansion of its official Gazoo Racing Club events and could one day rival Hyundai’s annual N Festival with its own GR fest.

Speaking to carsales at this week’s 2025 GR Corolla and GR Yaris media launch, local sales, marketing and franchise operations vice president Sean Hanley said work on a string of new GR Club events and a national festival was already well underway for next year.

“You’ll see, particularly as we have Supercars next year, an incredible escalation of GR presence, and our customers will be the beneficiaries,” he said.

“We do intend to have things like GR festivals … maybe not this year, but we’ll do some customer events this year, they’ll be relatively smaller.

“In the future, particularly as we enter Supercars, I would love to have a GR event … at Bathurst.

“By having a vehicle now in there [the championship], we can do these things – it opens up possibilities.”

Exactly how these next-level events will work and run is all yet to be confirmed, but following the rough blueprint of Hyundai’s award-winning N Fests would likely be a good place to start: show and shines, drive loops, guest speakers, tech talk, hot laps, track time and motorsport displays.

The expansion of these events could also coincide with the arrival of a new GR performance parts and packs catalogue directly inspired by the ones offered in Japan, with everything from brake pads, air filters and cosmetic enhancements through to adjustable coilover suspension, limited-slip differentials, heavy-duty clutches and transmissions on the table.

“GR is going to be a really strong performance brand of the future,” Hanley said, before revealing he went to the Tokyo Auto Salon last month almost explicitly to look into the Japanese performance parts.

“We were there to look at these performance parts, how it works in Japan, what are the possibilities for Australia – Australia though, does have very different ADR and homologation rules so there’s a few things we’ll need to work through and navigate.”

Another key detail Toyota will have to workout is the warranty coverage of its GR models if it plans on running GR Festivals with track elements integrated into the program, especially in light of a string of track-related GR Corolla fires and GR 86 engine failures that weren’t covered under warranty by the brand’s North American division.

With Hyundai offering a blanket non-competitive track warranty across its entire N portfolio and Cupra covering its models for track usage at official brand events, we asked Hanley point blank if Australian cars would be covered given their obvious track intent and motorsport connections.

“We got asked this question at the very onset of the launch of GR, the short answer is no … but the second part of the answer is we assess it on a case-by-case basis,” Hanley said.

Toyota Australia public affairs manager Jeremie Smith stipulated the “usage requirements” of a vehicle are taken “into account” when assessing warranty claims not just of GR products, but all Toyota models.