Officially marking the launch of Toyota’s motorsports-bred standalone performance brand, GR’s halo car is a renegade rulebreaker, a brutally overbuilt supercar with a rapacious appetite for the racetrack

BY AMANDA McCOY

The GR GT arrived as something like a vendetta. The low-slung, insanely overbuilt track machine is the upcoming halo car for GR (Gazoo Racing), Toyota’s newly minted standalone performance brand, and the marque’s first supercar since the legendary Lexus LFA circa 2012. Plans for the super-coupe have been in the works for roughly six years, but its seeds were planted long before. In the early 2000s, legendary Toyota master test driver Hiromu Naruse challenged Akio Toyoda – grandson of Toyota’s founder, but then still working his way up the company ranks – to learn how to walk the walk (err, drive). For years, Toyoda chased Naruse’s taillights, desperately attempting to keep up, before he was finally ready to test his driving skills on the infamous Nürburgring in Germany, widely hailed as the toughest racetrack on the planet. The board didn’t approve, so Toyoda adopted the alter-ego Morizo and named his team Gazoo Racing. But as the automaker didn’t have a proper performance car at the time, its future CEO trained and competed in used wheels – a humiliation Morizo avows he never got over.

Today, revenge is best served fast. Gazoo Racing developed the road-going GR GT and its GR GT3 racecar sibling in tandem, and the duo share an astonishing 80%-plus of the same components. So even by supercar standards, the GT’s hardware is gloriously unnecessary. Up front sits a newly developed, all-aluminum 4.0L twin-turbo V8 with dry-sump lubrication, churning out 641 ponies and 627 lb.-ft. of torque. A carbon-fiber torque tube carries power rearward to an eight-speed automatic transaxle that incorporates a single-motor hybrid, but don’t let the “H” word fool you. While the electric motor does provide a modicum of torque fill, 95% of the power comes from the sweet, sweet engine.

One of the coolest stories – and appropriate for the rule-breaking Morizo – is the reverse-design process. The engineers established the ideal aerodynamic form first and then made the exterior design conform to it, flipping the usual script of styling a car first and fixing the airflow afterward. This explains the extreme proportions: the GT is nearly 16 feet long and almost 79 inches wide, yet stands only 47 inches tall (the same height as the 2000GT, for you throwback supercar buffs). Engineers obsessively lowered components – and the driver – to bring the car’s center of gravity down, even positioning the driver close to the machine’s own center of mass. It looks like a race car crouching under a road-car costume because, essentially, that’s what it is.

The GR GT will be retailed through select Lexus dealerships. MSRP not official as of press time.

CALLOUTS: Cooling is absolutely critical, with four front-mounted radiators, bodywork shaped around airflow, and a dry-sump lubrication system helping the hot-V turbos survive sustained track abuse. GR’s development philosophy is brutally simple: race it, break it, fix it, repeat, with Morizo himself still taking the wheel as master driver to help hone the cars that wear the GR badge. The GT doesn’t ride on generic performance tires; it gets bespoke Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s developed specifically for the car to support extreme track days. The GT borrows the multi-stage vehicle stability control system from TGR’s Nürburgring 24-hour endurance race vehicles, which lets drivers tailor power and braking intervention to their skill level and road conditions. An all-aluminum frame, the first of its kind for Toyota, keeps the structure light and rigid, with carbon fiber deployed strategically where it needs it. The interior is track ready too, of course, with a low-slung driving position, tightly clustered controls, and gauges engineered to stay legible even at the limit. For an even more visceral experience, opt for the Recaro bucket seats.

GAZOO Racing — toyotagazooracing.com