The ultimate rally car project the WRC is glad COVID killed

“It was probably a good thing for the World Rally Championship that this car never came to be.”

That’s quite a statement from Toyota’s WRC technical director Tom Fowler, but he’s most probably correct. Fowler is referring to an abandoned project that appeared likely to dominate the WRC in 2021, perhaps like no other car had ever achieved, potentially blowing rivals Hyundai and M-Sport-Ford completely out of the water.

Its creators are adamant it was much faster than its predecessor, an ominous thought given Toyota romped to nine wins from 12 events with its old car in 2021. Of course, we will never truly know how good the ultimate Toyota GR Yaris WRC would have been, as the COVID-19 pandemic effectively killed it without a competitive rally under its belt.

Was the rallying world cruelly denied the chance to see a true masterpiece of engineering, or was the WRC lucky to avoid such dominance? Either way, the story of the GR Yaris WRC is a curious tale.

Despite the impending move towards Rally1 hybrid regulations for 2022, Toyota elected to push its resources into homologating a completely new car for the 2021 season - the final year of the popular 2017 WRC regulations that had already spawned modern day ‘Group B’ beasts.

PLUS: Why the WRC's 'modern Group B' era was rallying at its bonkers best

Buoyed by the launch of its all new GR Yaris road car, the platform was there for one last hurrah, pooling everything Toyota had learned from its previous Yaris into creating the ultimate WRC car. But let’s remember, the original Yaris WRC wasn’t exactly slow by any means. Launched in 2017, the car scored two wins in its debut season in Sweden (Jari-Matti Latvala) and Finland (Esapekka Lappi).

Toyota devoted significant time and resources to developing a new and improved GR Yaris WRC for 2021 before COVID resulted in a test ban

Photo by: Tom Howard

Five wins followed in 2018 thanks to Ott Tanak (Argentina, Finland, Germany and Turkey) and Latvala (Australia) as Toyota scooped the manufacturers' crown in only the second year of its much-heralded WRC return. Tanak secured the drivers’ title in 2019, a feat repeated by new signing Sebastien Ogier in the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign. There was seemingly no shortage of speed required to beat the opposition, or need for a new car.

But Toyota wanted more. It’s engineers spent a year and half working on a “Yaris Greatest Hits album”. What eventuated is a spectacular-looking GR Yaris WRC that now has pride of place in the foyer of Toyota’s Jyvaskyla factory in Finland, having never turned a wheel in anger.

This is because after four days of testing in 2020, the plan came to a grinding halt as the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic hit home. A testing ban was imposed on the teams in April 2020 which ultimately ended Toyota’s dream, ensuring it wouldn’t be possible to ready the car in time for the January 2021 season-opening Monte Carlo Rally.

"Have you see the aero on this thing? It is incredible. It was a very disappointing situation" Tom Fowler

Regardless, Toyota would still dominate the campaign. As he had the year before, Ogier came out on top in a head-to-head duel with team-mate Elfyn Evans as its rivals were left to feed from scraps. But sitting in its factory, furnished with the most Finnish of things, a sauna, is a WRC car on steroids that was significantly faster than the previous generation Yaris WRC. Fowler calls it “an incredible thing”.

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“This car is unbelievable,” he tells Autosport. “It is a WRC regulation car but built from the GR Yaris, so it is built to the same regulations as our 2017 Yaris. It is something which would have been driving in the season 2021, except from the situation with Coronavirus. To make a completely new homologation of a completely new car in the middle of that was not really feasible.

“If you recall back to mid-2020, there was a complete test ban in WRC and at that point we had driven the car for four days. Then the ban came and we were supposed to be introducing that in a matter of months after that. It became very complicated, but after those four days it was already faster than the Yaris.

“Have you see the aero on this thing? It is incredible. It was a very disappointing situation.”

Toyota still dominated the 2021 season with the older car it was pressed into continuing with

Photo by: Toyota Racing

Indeed, the GR Yaris WRC is eye-catching from every angle. It is pretty clear to see the areas where Toyota’s ingenuity was deployed. With the 2017 WRC regulations came a heavy focus on aerodynamics as cars sprouted plenty of appendages designed to create downforce, while yet still being slippery through the air. The current Rally1 regulations have clamped down on that area, with aero reduced by some 15% today. But the GR Yaris WRC shows what could have been had teams maxed out the capabilities in the aero department.

The car features much wider and more prominent dive planes at the front. This concept is extended to the wheel arches, where the side lip has been widened and designed to channel air to an all-new striking rear wing. Also at the rear is a new diffuser and modified rear fenders. Altogether, it creates quite a sight.

It is easy to understand Fowler's disappointment that the car never turned a wheel in competition, as a tremendous amount of hours by a team of people went into what is now effectively a show car in a workshop foyer. An untested potential world-beater, a game changer, reduced to a vision of what could have been.

“Unless you have done it, it is really difficult to understand what it takes to make any competition car,” Fowler adds. “To create a WRC car, the team effort that goes into it, it is a huge amount of work. It is one and half years of every single day doing more than a working day every day.

“It is a huge effort to design a car upstairs and what the guys do to assemble the first prototypes. In one and a half years, every single component of a new car has to be designed, manufactured, delivered, assembled, tested, and not work properly and [be] designed again potentially until it then goes to a rally and is scrutineered by the media.

“When we go to the rally, everyone is interested if something has fallen off or something broke. That thing you are scrutinising is someone’s one year of their lives. The reality is you can’t be involved in this unless it is your life. You can be waking up in the middle of the night and thinking that you can do that better and then in the morning try to remember what you had dreamt in the night and if it was real or not. This genuinely happens.

“In the late phases of designing the 2017 car, in the middle of the night I had a dream that we went to the first test and there was six reverse gears and one forward. You might laugh, but it has happened before. The gearbox and the engine is quite complicated which direction everything is rotating.

Insights from the mothballed car were applied to this year's Rally1 Toyota

Photo by: McKlein / Motorsport Images

“I woke up in the night thinking that the car had six reverse gears and I needed to find out from the schematics if my dream was real or not. I didn’t have my computer at home, so I had to go to work at 3 o’clock in the morning as I wasn’t going back to sleep. There was no point trying. This was two weeks before the car was going to be, and we were waiting for a gearbox at the time.”

Ultimately there was no need to panic over the GR Yaris WRC, as it was mothballed. But its legacy is still alive to some degree as Toyota was able to transfer some of the work carried out to its new 2022 GR Yaris Rally1.

"The way it was developed, as a package with the road car, it gave so many advantages that it was probably a good thing for the WRC this car never came to be" Tom Fowler

The new hybrid car proved a success as Kalle Rovanpera and co-driver Jonne Halttunen broke records on their way to the title, while Toyota picked up seven wins to claim a sixth WRC manufacturers’ title. Perhaps the car’s most impressive feat was scoring a top-four sweep at the tortuously challenging Safari Rally, repeating a feat last achieved by the marque in 1993.

PLUS: The key steps on Rovanpera's romp to a history-making WRC title

“We did learn a lot from this car,” Fowler adds. “And for Rally1 there was some learning - also we used some of the information to make updates to the previous WRC car. But the way it was developed, as a package with the road car, it gave so many advantages that it was probably a good thing for the WRC this car never came to be.”

It might be wishful thinking, but maybe one day Toyota will be allowed to field the GR Yaris WRC into a rally to show the world what it missed.

Will the GR Yaris that the WRC missed out on ever see the light of day in future?

Photo by: Tom Howard

Toyota’s other abandoned WRC project

The mothballed GR Yaris WRC isn’t the only rally car project that Toyota has been forced to abandon before hitting the WRC stages.

Wind back the clock to the mid-1980s and the WRC had welcomed in Group B regulations that produced arguably the championship’s most feared and revered monsters. However by 1985, one year before its eventual collapse, plans were emerging to try and rein in the speed of these cars.

The then global motorsport governing body FISA imposed restrictions on aerodynamics to reduce corner speed for its tweaked set of rules for 1986. But this was just the start of a more significant movement, led by FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre, as a draft for a new set of regulations to be known as Group S were drawn up.

These new rules were effectively a duplicate of the Group B regulations, but with an added emphasis on limiting horsepower. To appease manufacturers concerned by the financial burden of having to produce 200 cars in order to homologate a rally car, the new rules would only require 10 cars to be built. Set to be introduced in 1988, Group S was in a nutshell a rally prototype ruleset that allowed marques to continue to showcase the lightweight, exotic aerodynamic innovations displayed in Group B, albeit with some power restrictions in place.

Among the brands to sign up, including Lancia and Mazda, was Toyota. In 1984 it set about transforming its recently launched MR2 roadster into a rally car capable of tackling the world’s toughest stages. Toyota had been competing in Group B with a rear wheel drive Celica, but for this new Group S weapon the marque’s engineers elected to turn the MR2 into a four wheel drive, mid-engined rally car known as 222D. It is said that it would be capable of producing more than 700 horsepower, while weighing in at 750 kilograms. A real pocket rocket, in other words.

The first prototype was built in 1985 and featured significantly beefed up bodywork compared to the road going MR2. Its testing and development phase was well underway as Toyota geared up for the launch of Group S in 1988. However, the 222D would never reach the WRC.

Following the tragic deaths of Lancia’s Henri Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto at 1986 Tour De Corse, FISA moved to immediately ban Group B and subsequently scrap its plans for Group S. Ultimately Group S morphed into what became a much more sanitised Group A, as cars were restricted to 300 horsepower.

PLUS: How bonkers Group B replacements eluded the WRC

The 222D is one of many stillborn Group S cars that never competed. After the collapse of Group S, Toyota’s focus turned back to the Celica GT Four ST165 and its ST185 successor. Both would become a force in their own right, guiding Carlos Sainz to world titles in 1990 and 1992 before Juha Kankkunen and Didier Auriol continued the Celica’s success with titles in 1993 and 1994 respectively.

As for the 222D, it has been reported that only two examples of the car remain in existence. One is housed at Toyota’s Motorsport facility in Cologne, Germany, while the other is in Japan. The 222D has however made appearances at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in recent years.

Toyota's mothballed Group S 222D has seen the public eye at Goodwood

Photo by: Motorsport Images