Toyota planning GR sports model range

From white-goods on wheels to serious performance road-car contender. That’s the image change Toyota Australia wants GAZOO Racing to deliver.

The first shot in the campaign will be the reborn A90 Supra sports car in the second half of 2019, which will have ‘GR’ — a contraction of GAZOO Racing — branding as part of its name.

“We believe this is a really good car for our market,” Toyota Australia marketing and sales chief Sean Hanley told carsales.com.au.

“It’s a car that for us is about re-establishing our brand credentials as a true Toyota sports vehicle.”

It will be followed into the showrooms of Australia’s top-selling automotive brand at regular intervals by GR models expected to include a Corolla hot hatch  and a Ford Ranger Raptor rival based on Australia’s most popular new vehicle, the Toyota HiLux.

As reported separately here, even the new RAV4, is a chance to get the GR treatment.

GAZOO Racing, which performs a similar motorsport and road car tuning function for Toyota as Ford Performance does for the Blue Oval, was officially launched last Saturday in Australia.

Then the emphasis was on a two-car Yaris assault on the Australian Rally Championship under the Toyota Gazoo Racing Australia banner.

But the move into high-performance road cars via GAZOO Racing is at least equally important according to Hanley.

“This whole GAZOO Racing arm of our global company will allow us to explore an expansive range of products in terms of sports performance,” he told carsales.com.au.

“Supra is a significant launch for Australia because it relaunches us as a serious contender in performance cars.

“We make no secret that we want to expand to other cars in the future. At what timing and speed of those types of vehicles is yet to be determined, but we definitely have a strong plan of consideration to bring GAZOO Racing across some other vehicles.”

GR develops vehicles in different states of tunes. For instance, a mildly modified HiLux GR Sport has been unveiled in Brazil, while the Europe-only 155kW Yaris YRMN hot hatch is at the other end of the spectrum. MN stands for ‘Meisters of the Nurburgring’.

Hanley said bringing in GR accessories and models with different grades of performance was “possible” in the future, adding that achieving the green light would be based on a number of factors.

“Can we access them, what sort of volume can we possibly do, how would our market react? These kind of things,” he said.

Toyota has previously tried to develop the TRD (Toyota Racing Developments) brand in Australia with locally-tuned hot versions of the Camry and HiLux, but that proved unsuccessful.

GR-branded road vehicles won’t have any serious local design and development input, although Hanley said Toyota Australia was being kept in the loop.

“We are deeply involved with the GR team in Japan,” he said. “We have representatives who attend all the conferences and product developments, particularly at this time around the marketing side.

“We have a strong link to be able to access products of the future that may become available.”

Hanley confirmed that all Toyota dealers would have access to GR production models and that they would feature GR branding.

What’s coming from Toyota GR:
A90 Supra — mid-2019
Corolla GR — TBC
HiLux GR — TBC
RAV4 GR — TBC
C-HR GR — TBC
Yaris GR — TBC
86 GR — TBC