Yes, we know it’s a Toyota and we have our suspicions of the flavor – but what exactly is it and what was it doing?
You had to feel for last week’s Rally Raid Portugal. When it came to mainland Europe’s most westerly nation, all eyes were on the red, white and black coupe kicking up the dust on the Boticas roads south of Montalegre.
The second round of the World Rally-Raid Championship was almost overlooked.
Even though last week was the second public test of the Toyota that may or may not be a Celica – or an MR2 – there’s been little word from Jyväskylä or Toyota City. In an effort to break the silence, we went to the man whose pen this 2027 creation has come from: Tom Fowler.
“This is still our original prototype car,” is the answer to the question of what it is. He’s not going to be drawn on names. It’s a camo-liveried Toyota with a wing and a nice noise.
“It’s the car which has been running since the end of last year,” Fowler continued. “We were in Portugal for further evaluation, this time working on some rougher, harder gravel roads. It’s a test which was focused on reliability and car specification.”
Reading between the lines, it’s an interim development-specification car. Is it the final WRC27? No. Is it close? Maybe. The team is still relatively early in the testing cycle of the car, with much of the early running having been completed by the team’s test driver Juho Hänninen.
Perhaps the real significance last week came in the fact that Hänninen stepped aside for Oliver Solberg and Sami Pajari to run the car in anger for the first time. DirtFish understands Elfyn Evans and Takamoto Katsuta have already driven it.
“We’re just starting to get some more feedback from the works drivers on the direction for the car,” Fowler told DirtFish. “It can be difficult for the drivers and for the engineers to manage the process of understanding the feedback if drivers have just stepped out of a Rally1 car into a 2027-spec car, where the regulation is essentially heavily based on Rally2. The performance difference between those two cars, even when they’re on ultimate specification, is already massive.
“You can imagine that, I mean, we didn’t have the greatest Safari Rally, but still there were periods of time where our drivers were on wide-open throttle for long periods of time over incredibly rough conditions. And the Rally1 car is just soaking that up and it’s driving incredibly well through very difficult, hard conditions. That comes about from five years of development, from the increased cost cap that’s allowed on this car, the technicality behind it, hugely powerful engine, all of these topics. Then you step into the ’27 car, a day later, you start to miss something.
“Essentially, what we’re trying to really manage is to understand what feedback is really about the car of this [2027] regulation and what feedback is about the difference between the Rally1 car and the 2027 car. That’s not so easy to do. And it’s why our test program has been with test drivers not from our Rally1 team, because that neutral feedback is important.”
Question answered. That’s what Toyota was doing in Portugal last week. Typically, answering one question only brings another. And the most obvious one was on performance. Insiders have talked of the 2027 car being slower than current Rally2 machinery, but is that truly the case?
