Toyota GAZOO Racing Australia launched

Toyota is going fully GAZOO in Australia as it ramps up its motorsport involvement and prepares for the arrival of the hot new Toyota Supra coupe in mid-2019.

Harry, Lewis and Neal Bates will mount an all-out attack on next year's Australian Rally Championship with a pair of Toyota Yaris prototypes under the banner of Toyota GAZOO Racing Australia, which will be joined by the Toyota GR sports car sub-brand next year,

The new GAZOO colours were previewed today ahead of Harry Bates’ entry in the winner-takes-all final leg of this year’s forest racing championship, Rally Australia in Coffs Harbour.

The Coffs Coast event will see Bates’ new-look Yaris run in the same field as the official three-car World Rally Championship GAZOO team operated by Finland’s Tommi Makinen.

Toyota is still resisting any involvement in Supercars racing but created the highly-successful Toyota 86 one-make circuit racing series and has supported Neal Bates in rallying for more than two decades.

Now, after Bates Senior’s graduation to team owner, it’s his sons who will do the driving as Harry looks for his first national championship and Lewis steps into the top league for the first time next year.

The new team is called Toyota GAZOO Racing Australia and work is well underway at the Bates’ workshop in Canberra on the second Yaris AP4 for next year’s six-round national championship.

“Australians have long had an enthusiastic appetite for motorsport and performance cars and we are committed to delivering the excitement they offer through initiatives like the new rally team,” said Toyota Australia chief marketing officer, Wayne Gabriel.

“Toyota has always recognised the value of participating in motorsport as a means of developing ever more durable, reliable and exciting cars.”

Toyota Australia has backed Neal Bates since he won a ’star search’ competition to race a Toyota Corolla in the Bathurst 1000 in 1989, and has extended more than two decades of support for his Canberra-based rally team in a succession of Celica, Corolla and Yaris cars. He also road raced a number of Toyota models, including the Celica and MR2, in production car events at Bathurst.

Bates groomed his sons through a range of grassroots motorsport events before Harry, and then Lewis, moved into rallying.

Both youngsters have shown pace from the start, although they have also had the inevitable crashes that come with pushing to the limit in forest racing.

“I am immensely proud that Harry and Lewis can continue our very strong partnership with the brand and we as a team have the opportunity to run under the Toyota GAZOO Racing banner,” said Neal Bates.

GAZOO Racing is the personal motorsport brand of Toyota supremo Akio Toyoda, himself a keen amateur racer. GAZOO is derived from the Japanese word gazo, which means photograph or image.

Toyoda used GAZOO for his first private motoring business, advertising second-hand cars over the internet with pictures, and he took it to the track in 2007 when he raced in the Nurburgring 24 Hour in Germany.

Toyota GAZOO Racing has been adopted as the umbrella name for all the company’s top-level motorsport programs, including Le Mans -- which Toyota won for the first time this year -- the World Endurance Championship and the World Rally Championship it re-entered in 2017 after an 18-year absence.

Apart from GAZOO in motorsport, Toyota is using GR -- a contraction of GAZOO Racing -- as a product brand to develop sports cars including the Toyota Supra and also go-faster parts for special-edition models.

There is no official news yet on the timing or details of GR’s introduction in local showrooms, but Toyota Australia has previously confirmed the Supra would be sold under the GR brand here.