It is always a great day when you’re coming back from a loan car pick up driving back an all wheel drive, turbocharged, manual, rally-inspired hatchback. All the credentials are there to back up the pedigree of the Toyota GR Yaris and, albeit very short, this is my third encounter with this little rascal. So, this time, things went a bit differently.
I took the car for the usual loop I take most press cars, including the detour reserved to those that have any pretensions of being good to drive. The small, nimble cars shine on that loop, and I think the only way to up the fun with the GR would be take it to the track – it’s just too bad I don’t have any track days booked. But, on the virtual realm, possibilities are (almost) endless…
There’s something oddly satisfying about stepping out of a real GR Yaris and firing up Gran Turismo 7 to drive… the very same GR Yaris. Same spec, same colour, same cheeky attitude, with the benefit of not needing petrol, tyres, or having to respect track closure times. I couldn’t resist the idea of recreating it virtually, just to see how close the digital version really felt, and maybe see what would happen if I took it too far.
In the real world, the GR Yaris is a car with character enough to make even a short loan like this memorable. The snarls of the raspy little three-cylinder turbo, the manual gearbox, and the GR-FOUR system grip are some of the highlights. It’s small, purposeful, and eager, and this is extremely hard to capture in a videogame. I spent most of my week darting through traffic, laughing out loud at how much personality Toyota had packed into something this compact.
But once I parked it up for the night, curiosity got the better of me. I fired up the PlayStation, scrolled through the GT7 garage, and there it was: my Yaris, virtually identical. I took it to Fuji Speedway, a great proving ground for small cars punching above their weight, and a place you are very likely to see souped up Toyotas. The result? Two minutes flat around the circuit in stock form. Respectable.
Then, naturally, I wondered — what if I ruined it? Those that grew up with the GT franchise will know it is an entire ecosystem of car culture, equal parts education and hoarding. It’s a digital museum where you can trace the history of iconic cars, and then race and modify the ones you own, all the way to doing wildly inappropriate engine swaps into otherwise sensible cars.
So, there I was, in the game’s tuning shop, staring at two options: an American V8 or Toyota’s own legend, the 2JZ-GTE from the Mk4 Supra, and you can probably guess which way I went. The 2JZ has a reputation that borders on myth: bulletproof, endlessly tunable, and that famous soundtrack. Keeping it in the family felt right.
Things usually get silly quite quickly when modding cars in real life, so think about how much quicker that happens when I’m spending credits I won racing. Intake, exhaust, head work, turbos, tuning, all the usual suspects. The power figure leapt from a modest 200-something kilowatts to something that would make a supercar blush. The power-to-weight ratio more than doubled.
Back at Fuji, the difference was staggering. The stopwatch stopped at 1:42, almost twenty seconds quicker. The GR-FOUR system, even virtually, somehow managed to translate all that chaos into forward motion. And when I lined up for a quick race, the game clearly understood what I’d done: the automatic matchmaking put me alongside cars like a Ferrari 812 Superfast and a Lamborghini Veneno. Excuse me? My hot hatch was now sharing a grid with full fledged exotics.
Switching back to the real car the next morning was refreshing. The Yaris in my driveway is civilised: taut and punchy, but not insane. The steering is alive, the turbo has old school lag, and the exhaust dominates the experience. It reminded me that while games can exaggerate the physics and power, the real charm of this car lies in its balance. It’s a car that doesn’t need fantasy to be fun.
Still, there’s something beautifully meta about experiencing both versions side by side. The digital car let me explore the wild “what if” scenarios, while the real one grounded me in why the GR Yaris exists in the first place. It’s engineered joy, raw, and refreshingly honest.
Gran Turismo captures a slice of that magic, albeit a very thin one. The real car is the purist’s dream; the digital one is what happens when there are no restrictions. But, the more I drove the digital version, the more I wanted to get back on the road with the real one. Character and driving pleasure are more than power figures and cylinder counts, and my 2JZ-GTE GR Yaris is perfect proof of that. Thanks, Toyota, for making the GR Yaris a reality, and thank you for reading this far!
