Toyota is in a unique position ahead of the 2027 World Rally Championship.
While not alone in developing a brand-new WRC27 machine, it stands apart from the rest by having one of its own cars as a competitor.
With no Kit developed for it, the existing GR Yaris Rally2 will not be eligible to score constructors’ points. However WRC27, Rally2 Kits and Rally2 have been designed to have performance parity, meaning Toyota’s Rally2 car could well prove competitive on individual events or indeed the drivers’ championship.
That puts the Japanese marque’s technical team in a strange situation, as Toyota technical director Tom Fowler explained.
“This is probably one of the most challenging and number one topics of this development program is that normally for WRC development and for Rally1 development, everyone goes away with a regulation book and scrambles to do the fastest possible car based on this book, and you have no idea what everyone else is doing,” Fowler said.
“And then everyone turns up at Monte Carlo with a completely new car to completely new regulations and you find out who’s done the best job. 2027 regulations are a bit different because the regulation from the beginning was always written in a way that it’s equivalent to Rally2, so in a way you already know what your competition is because you need to be faster than a Rally2 car.
“So our development target has always been to understand from the very first drawings and the very first concepts that we have to work in a way that we are competitive against Rally2, and so we have benchmarked against our own car on a number of occasions.”
This could prove a crucial advantage for Toyota, as it has an in-house benchmark to measure its new car against. But it also has the potential to be awkward, if the GR Yaris Rally2 – homologated in 2024 – proves more performant than the WRC27 car.
Fowler: “Well I think there’s no surprise in the results that the current Rally2 cars, which are winning rallies in the GR Yaris and of course our competitors in Škoda and so on, we’ve been working on this car in all the different rallies for a couple of seasons now, so the car is in a good place.
“So to go out with a brand new car with the same engine, the same transmission regulations and a different chassis, it’s not straightforward to be immediately faster. It takes some work.
“But of course our target is to beat our own car and that’s our benchmark. I think the interesting thing about rally is that even if we manage to do that, the conditions that we have in snow, gravel, Tarmac and different road orders and drivers and so on, the fundamental thing is that the car has the same power to weight ratio so it’s not going to be that much different.”
Toyota has already done over 5,000 kilometers of testing with its WRC27 machine, utilizing its rally drivers as well as Ott Tänak, who has returned to the brand in a testing and development role.
But will it keep developing the GR Yaris Rally2 as well?
“I mean this is kind of a strange topic, isn’t it?” said Fowler. “Because we have to continue developing for Rally2 because we still have a strong customer motorsport program going with this car.
“Our philosophy on this is that if we develop our own Rally2 car to be better, then we have to beat it with our own 27 car and we keep shuffling forwards. To start pulling your own products backwards to beat them doesn’t seem to be like a reasonable solution.”
