The threat the new Toyota GR and Mercedes GT3s pose to the category

We know a little more about the car that was hitherto referred to as the GR GT3 Racing Concept after its belated launch early in December. It is after all a GR, for the Gazoo Racing sub-brand, rather than a Toyota or Lexus. It’s built around an all-aluminium chassis and powered by a twin-turbo V8. What we don’t know is when it is going to start racing, though expect a handful of development outings in 2026 ahead of full homologation and a release to customers for the season after.

Yet there’s a much more important question raised by the car, one that probably won’t be answered for some time to come. And that’s what effect the Toyota, sorry GR, is going to have on GT3 as a category.

The Japanese manufacturer’s approach to entering the class for the first time - not counting the Lexus RC F GT3 - threatens to destabilise what is arguably the biggest motorsport success story of the past 20 years. Its arrival and that of Mercedes with something based on the Concept AMG GT Track Sport announced last year could change the face of the class. More to the point, they could destroy it.

The connection between the Toyota and the Merc is that the base car has been developed specifically to enable the manufacturer to produce a GT3 racing car - in both cases we can assume a rather extreme GT3 racer. That hasn’t been the case before. Manufacturers produced road cars and then turned them into what have over time become ever more sophisticated racers.

That’s not to say that the motorsport departments of the relevant manufacturers in the past weren’t saying to the cars’ designers something like, ‘Doing this would rather help us when it comes to racing, and this most definitely wouldn’t’. Even as long ago as the early 2000s, Audi Sport embedded an engineer in the road car design team as it worked on turning its Le Mans quattro Concept into its first mid-engined production sportscar, the car we know as the R8.

But the cars themselves were built for the road in numbers that would be described as large. That’s very large in the case of a GT3 based on a hot saloon-type car such as the sporty M version of BMW’s 4-series, or something a little rarer and racier in the case of the Ferrari 296, McLaren’s 720S, or Lamborghini’s outgoing Huracan or incoming Temerario.

The WEC's LMGT3 class is currently thriving since its introduction in 2024

Photo by: FIAWEC - DPPI

You may reckon that the beauty of GT3 is that the Balance of Performance, a concept honed in the category, allows for a range of machinery, big and small, front and mid-engined, exotic and more run of the mill. An enduring image for me from back in the early days of the FIA GT3 European Championship circa 2009 is the Morgan Aero 8 Super Sport going door to door with the BMW Alpina B6.

If you’d chucked in a 430 Scuderia, the GT3 Ferrari of the time, you’d have had the full gamut of the different kinds of cars competing in the class at the time. I like to remind people that M-Sport managed to turn two generations of Bentley Continental, behemoths of machines when compared to some of their rivals, into winners in GT3. And BMW is showing today what is possible with a more mundane base car in the M4.

That variety has been one of the calling cards of GT3. But the sands shifted with the introduction of what were dubbed the 2022 rules. They did away with the old premise that the more you had to do to the base car, the more you were allowed to do. Developing a GT3 car was always a process of negotiation with the rulemakers. That changed with a more coherent set of regulations early this decade: now a manufacturer developing a high-tech sportscar for GT3 is allowed the same freedoms as another marque starting out with something altogether more humble.

For all the balancing and levelling of the playing field, real racing cars tend to do rather better than cars developed out of road-going machinery

Many regarded that as a step in the wrong direction. Stephane Ratel, the architect of GT3 and the boss of so many of the series running to its rules, was among them. The new rules have arguably forced Toyota and Mercedes down the extreme route they are taking today. The German manufacturer, certainly, didn’t have a suitable machine for the class under the latest regulations. The 2+2 replacement for the car known in its racing form as the Mercedes-AMG GT3 was deemed too heavy and too bulky for competition. That didn’t appear to stop Bentley. But that was in the old days.

The arrival of the GR (which I do really want to call a Toyota and probably will more often than not in the years to come) and the Mercedes represent an escalation with which an old hand like me is far too familiar. History tells us that the arrival of machinery designed to be racing cars first and road cars second tends to be rather destructive as far as GT racing goes.

Think back to the days of the first GT1 era in the latter half of the 1990s. Porsche arrived with its parts-bin special, the mid-engined 911 GT1, in 1996, igniting an arms race that led to the Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR being developed for the inaugural season of the FIA GT Championship the following year. Costs spiralled and the end result was the death of the class.

In the late 1990s and 2000s GT costs spiralled with the introduction of racer-first concepts

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Fast-forward to the middle of the next decade, and the arrival of the Maserati MC12 in ‘new’ GT1 in FIA GTs at the back end of 2004. Series boss Ratel didn’t want to allow in such an extreme car. FIA president Max Mosley’s answer was the BoP: if Maserati wanted to race a car developed specifically for racing, then it would have its wings clipped. Literally: remember that diddly rear wing the car had to run?

The Maserati didn’t dominate in the same way as the CLK-GTR and its successor, the GT-LM, did: between them they won every FIA GT round in the last year of the original GT1 class in 1998. The BoP, combined with success ballast, probably explains that. But it did win four championships in a row up to the end of FIA GTs in 2009, and just for good measure then won the inaugural FIA GT1 World Championship the following year.

My point is that for all the balancing and levelling of the playing field, real racing cars tend to do rather better than cars developed out of road-going machinery.

Will other manufacturers be forced to follow the lead of Toyota and Mercedes to remain competitive? And more pertinently will they be able to afford to do so? Not every manufacturer can produce a niche model, and that’s what these new cars will inevitably be. The bar for entry into GT3 is relatively low in terms of production numbers of the road car. Just 300 units, built in the first two years of sales, is the mark they have to hit. Even annual production for the Ferrari is into four figures.

The danger is that the GR GT3 and whatever the Concept AMG ends up being called could spark some kind of arms race. And that is one thing we definitely know a lot about from the history of GT racing over the past 30 years.

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Will other manufacturers need to follow Toyota and Mercedes in producing specialised GT3 racers?

Photo by: Mercedes AMG