Part two of a three part series on three weeks with the GR Yaris — the brand, the drive, the daily.
Back for another piece of the GR Yaris. Last time, I wrote about the idea of this car and how that connects to GR now being its own brand, but we all know ideas are cheap. What matters is whether that survives weeks of actual day-to-day living, long detached from the controlled environment of a press release. From the track session at Hampton Downs on brand launch day, and then however many roads I could find in the weeks after, including some proper back road blasts, my fourth time with a GR Yaris is the longest yet, and shows no signs of getting old.
Hampton Downs is always a great time, especially with a car like this. The AWD is recalibrated from Gen 1 to Gen 2, with revised front-rear splits, and under anything civilised the changes are hard to notice, which I bet is the point. Push it on a circuit and the car is extremely predictable, exactly what you’d want from a well calibrated all wheel drive system, and the short wheelbase makes it feel like it wants to change direction immediately. That predictability makes you feel like a hero, but it might also be the reason why so many people end up pushing the performance envelope.
At 1.88m, getting a helmet on in the cabin of a Gen I car is borderline impossible for me, but much easier on the Gen II cars, thanks to the lowered seat bases. Going for the newer car, you also get a new, revised dashboard that feels more motorsport inspired, and some important mechanical changes (remember the refinement mantra?).
And we have to talk, again, about that engine. Cold, the three-cylinder is gruff and a little rough, and it reminds you it’s not a token engine even before you’ve engaged first. There’s synthesised engine noise piped into the cabin (a lot of it, enough that it buzzes the door cards at points), and I’d normally find that cynical. Here I didn’t mind, because the theatre it’s selling isn’t fake, it’s just amplified.
Getting 200kW out of a 1.6 litre means big turbo lag, and you feel all of it pulling hard through third gear, that wait before the boost shoves you back. In theory, it’s a flaw, but here it adds to the old school rally car personality, building tension before it delivers, and across the weeks I never got tired of waiting for it.
The steering is appropriately weighted, not artificially loaded up just to simulate sporty, even though it doesn’t talk back the way an old GT-FOUR, a WRX, or an Evo used to. That’s a genuine loss, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but it definitely pays back in speed, assertiveness and also the fact that it offers proper modernities like assisted driving and lane keep assist when you want it.
I had other press loans alongside the GR Yaris, but whenever the errand involved a nice drive, it was the one I chose, and in two of those times, I extended the drive for a there-and-back to Piha. It’s a proper coastal run: tight, broken in places, not forgiving of a car that can’t deal with a bad surface mid-corner, and the GR Yaris just gets on with it.
The suspension, which can feel firm and over dampened in regular driving if you’re expecting pure comfort, feels very suited to the task, with enough travel to absorb the rough stuff without the car losing its composure, and the short wheelbase that makes it nimble in a car park makes it genuinely flickable on a road that changes its mind every hundred metres. Once that turbo lag clears, there’s real torque to get you out of the tight stuff, and the gearing invites you to keep shifting instead of leaving it in third and coasting on torque, which is exactly the kind of involvement a car like this should be selling. And when you lean on the car properly, for real, that tells you whether the engineering was serious: after that whole drive, pushed the way it’s meant to be pushed, oil and water temperatures never moved, the brakes got hot but never soft, and it didn’t feel like the right time to rely on the Intercooler injectors. Nothing got unhappy, nothing asked me to back off and let it recover.
Shifting itself sits in the middle of the pack against its rivals, being notchy, clicky and honest. Not the best gearbox in today’s enthusiast class, but far from the worst, and consistent with everything else this car is doing: asking you to be involved rather than doing the work for you. However, if you actually want that, there is automatic rev matching and even an automatic offering, which I won’t scoff at you choosing, because it’s actually quite good.
It’s also, by now, a well-known secret that this platform takes modification seriously. People here in New Zealand are pulling close to four figure horsepower out of these engines, which sounds unfathomable until you see what kind of hardware these tinkerers are working with. This powertrain has some serious performance headroom, and not only has the aftermarket had a field day with it, but Toyota themselves are also open to the idea, thanks to the rich brand-backed catalogue of mods that I would tick every box in a car of my own.
None of this happens in a vacuum, either. The brand piece talked about a feedback loop, from motorsport to road car, then to customer and back again, as something GR says it believes in. A track session and a coastal road don’t prove a corporate slogan, but they do something else: they put substance behind the marketing stance, and make it feel real. A month with this car solidified all of that, but was to be expected. Questioning how this car stacks up as daily transportation for that period is a totally different topic – and that’s up next.
