The Toyota Gazoo Racing Australia (TGRA) rally team will campaign a pair of new Toyota GR Yaris Rally2 cars in the 2024 Australian Rally Championship (ARC).
Factory-built by Toyota Japan, the new GR Yaris Rally2 cars are replacing the locally built and designed GR Yaris AP4s. Fittingly, 2023 ARC champions Harry Bates and Coral Taylor will debut one of the new cars at the opening round in Canberra.
A second GR Yaris Rally2 car is due to arrive in time for the third round of the season and it will be driven by 2023 ARC season runners-up Lewis Bates and co-driver Anthony McLoughlin.
The Australian-designed and built GR Yaris AP4s served well with Toyota taking the manufacturers’ title and the team winning the driver’s and co-driver’s championship titles for the past two years.
The GR Yaris AP4s were engineered and built locally by Neal Bates Motorsport, which manages the TGRA Rally Team, with bodywork designed in collaboration with Toyota Australia’s local design team.
It was the first time that Toyota Australia had been involved in the design of a rally car and at the time, the AP4 became the world’s first off-tarmac rally car to be based on the then-new GR Yaris.
Bates says he was proud of what the team has achieved in the AP4s over the past three years since it made its debut in Canberra in early 2021.
“Right from the start, we knew we had a winning car but a COVID-interrupted season that first year meant no championship was awarded. But we came back blitzing the field in 2022 with Lewis and Anthony taking the ARC title ahead of myself and Coral in the final round before we turned the tables on them last year to take the season win,” Bates says.
“With the new factory GR Yaris Rally2 car, we’re confident we’ll be able to maintain that edge.
“We’ve watched how the car has performed since its first outing in the second-tier World Rally Championship (WRC2) at Monte Carlo in January and in Sweden this month and can’t wait to get behind the wheel of the new car in our home-town rally in Canberra in April,’ he says.
The new GR Yaris Rally2 car is Toyota’s first factory-built rally car homologated for WRC2 competition and is available for customers across the world to buy and compete in both WRC2 and national championships.
Like the TGRA team’s AP4s, it runs a 1.6-litre turbocharged three-cylinder engine that drives all four wheels through a five-speed sequential transmission.
A prototype of the new GR Yaris Rally2 car made its public debut at Rally Japan in 2022 driven by then Toyota global President and now Chairman Akio Toyoda and rally legend Juha Kankkunen, and has since covered more than 15,000km in competition development.
The new rally car was officially granted homologation by the world’s motorsport governing body Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) in January with four teams entering the 2024 WRC season opener in Monte Carlo driving the GR Yaris Rally2.
