Toyota Gazoo Racing will pit two teams and two different cars head-to-head against each other in the race for next year’s World Rally Championship.
The radical plan was communicated at Toyota’s team launch on Tuesday, with three crews running a GR Yaris Rally1 and the same number of crews competing in a GR Celica Rally1. The teams will be named Toyota Racing and Gazoo Racing. All the key components in the cars are identical – the only difference is in the bodyshell which sit on top of the spaceframe chassis.
Toyota has declined to comment on who will drive for each team. As defending World Rally champion Elfyn Evans might be expected to be given first choice of the car, but who will share his team? Toyota’s technical director Tom Fowler has shed some light on the overall strategy.
“It’s very much not a project of A and B team,” Fowler told DirtFish. “This is not about senior and junior drivers. It’s a project of promoting two teams with two different cars with the skill sets on both sides to fight for the championship, both against the opposition and against each other.”
This will be the first time in a generation a manufacturer has homologated two models to spearhead its WRC effort. Fowler told DirtFish it was a change of Rally1 regulation which presented this unique opportunity for Toyota to run two cars.
“Before now,” said Fowler, “there was a specific regulation that said that for Rally1 homologation, there’s only one model allowed per manufacturer. That regulation has been changed to say, as long as the main mechanical components remain identical, you can do a variant model of your Rally1.
“We had this opportunity to use this as a marketing tool and as a tool to increase the participation and to make things more interesting. There’s not really a big change, in the past we have run four, five or six cars on an event – but they’ve all been the same. This time, instead of running identical cars, we’re going to run two cars.”
While the two cars remain identical under the skin, there have been complications in developing two cars in tandem.
“Our development has, as you can imagine, been more complicated with two cars,” added Fowler. “So much of these two cars will be interchangeable, but there are areas where we’ve had to do more work. The aerodynamic development, for example. Even though the two cars don’t look the same we’ve designed them so they deliver the same aerodynamic performance.
“Normally, you set an aerodynamic criteria which is based on one body shape, but in this case we’ve set the same criteria for two different body shapes which means the aerodynamic devices need to be different in each model to get the same end result.”
Asked about the work involved in bringing two teams and two cars to next season, Fowler smiled: “It hasn’t made our life easier, put it that way. And then, of course, we have six crews and every crew has a back-up car for the next round or for the round after. I don’t know if there’s a team which has ever had 12 cars ready for the start of a new season. The sheer production volume and the production variety of having two models has brought us a massive challenge – and the timeline to bring two cars has certainly squeezed some aspects of the development.
“Having two cars means we’re having to make sure we’re doing some things twice. For example, if we discover a specific issue with one car, does it impact the other? It’s really quite a big, scary challenge that we haven’t actually completed yet. We submitted the homologation paperwork this morning and the [FIA] inspection for homologation is in December. It’s not the most comfortable position to be in right now, knowing we have two months to get everything nailed down.”
