Toyota is officially giving Gazoo Racing its own identity in New Zealand, with GR now operating as a standalone performance brand focused on motorsport, enthusiast cars and the pursuit of driving excitement.
After spending two days with Toyota at Hampton Downs, I got to see first hand what sits behind this change, and it is considerably more than a rebranding exercise. The move is part of a broader transformation that has been heavily influenced by Toyota chairman, Mr. Akio Toyoda, and his long running push to bring emotion and performance back into the company’s DNA.
Toyota will continue to focus on mobility and everyday transportation, while GR gets a much more clearly defined role: building cars for enthusiasts, developing motorsport and creating a community around performance. And Toyota NZ chose a brilliant way to introduce that idea.
Rather than a convention room and a collection of static cars, we spent two days at Hampton Downs, surrounded by GR road cars, competition machinery, Toyota engineers and product planners who had travelled from Japan specifically to be part of the event. I recorded a video about it here:
There was plenty of track time, including GR Sport models driven back to back with their conventional Toyota counterparts, GR Yaris, GR86 and GR Supra, as well as the opportunity to see Toyota’s new GRF-70 race car in action.
We also met Ryan Wood, Toyota’s newest racing driver, who took me around Hampton Downs in a GR Supra at considerably more speed than I would have managed myself. His involvement is another piece of the bigger GR picture, with Toyota looking to use motorsport not only to develop cars, but to identify and develop drivers capable of progressing onto the international stage.
I spent time with Yamada-san, the Japanese product manager responsible for the GR Yaris, who walked me through the latest Aero Performance Package and the thinking behind its development, and that conversation was a pretty good demonstration of what GR is trying to be. These aren’t cars that Toyota considers finished when they reach the showroom: instead, motorsport provides an environment where engineers can find weaknesses, develop solutions and then bring those lessons back to the road.
And the relationship goes both ways. Toyota is also paying close attention to its customers, including the enthusiast community here in New Zealand. Owners modifying their GR cars, buying genuine GR Parts and developing their own ideas are becoming another source of feedback for the engineers developing the next generation of products.
Toyota now wants to use GR to create an ecosystem around performance, with road cars, motorsport, engineering, driver development, aftermarket products and, importantly, the people who actually care about these things.
Toyota can continue doing what Toyota does exceptionally well: building the cars that get millions of people where they need to go. GR, meanwhile, gets to concentrate on those of us who want to take the long way home.
