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The Toyota GR GT is unlike anything the company has built before. Yes, the Lexus LFA proved that Toyota could transcend its humdrum reputation and build a true supercar, but the GR GT was built specifically with racing in mind. According to the automaker, the need to make the GR GT3 race car competitive influenced design decisions for the road car, not the other way around.
“This entire vehicle was designed to be a race car first,” Toyota Senior Vice President of Automotive Operations Andrew Gilleland declared in a video for IMSA’s YouTube channel. “So you look at the road car, you see all the aero bits and pieces. Those aren’t for show.”
IMSA via YouTube
There are some differences of course—such as the race car’s big rear wing, larger air vents to serve its greater cooling needs, and front-fender vents—but as we learned from a side-by-side comparison of the race car and road car at Fuji Speedway last year, there’s a lot of commonality. In fact, Gilleland claims the GR GT3 shares over 80% of its components with the GR GT road car. That’s compared to 25% commonality between the Lexus RC F GT3 that Toyota currently races in IMSA and its road-car counterpart.
Race-car optimization meant trying some things that were new for Toyota, but not necessarily for sports cars as a whole. The GR GT road car has a hybrid powertrain built around a new 4.0-liter, twin-turbo V8 that targets 641 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque in road-legal form. The race car ditches the hybrid system but keeps the V8, which has turbos mounted in a “hot-V” configuration and is mounted well back in the chassis, which you can see in the video when the hood is lifted. It’s not that different from the Mercedes-AMG GT GT3 the GR GT3 will compete with, but a giant leap for Toyota and an exciting moment for sports-car racing fans.
Revealing the GR GT3’s Secrets | The NEW Gazoo Racing GT3 Race Car!
The last comparable effort to build a winning race car and reverse-engineer it into a road car for homologation purposes was the Ford GT. But that program was narrowly focused on delivering Ford a GT-class win at the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the GT40’s legendary victory over Ferrari. Toyota is making a more open-ended commitment with the GR GT, although like the Ford GT road car, it’s going to be scarce by design.
As host Marshall Pruett points out in the video, Toyota was a fixture in sports-car racing during IMSA’s glory days, both in production-based and prototype classes. The Lexus RC F GT3 has added to that legacy, winning the 2023 GTD Pro driver, team, and manufacturer championship in the hands of Vasser Sullivan Racing. The GR GT promises even bigger things.
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Stephen has always been passionate about cars, and managed to turn that passion into a career as a freelance automotive journalist. When he’s not handling weekend coverage for The Drive, you can find him looking for a new book to read.
