Gazoo Racing Is Bringing Toyota To The Forefront Of High Performance

Toyota has been going through a bit of a reinvention as of late. After decades spent focusing almost exclusively on the development of pragmatic people movers, the company that brought us the Prius has turned its attention back to the kind of feisty machines that made the brand an enthusiast favorite in the 1980s and 90s. 

Today, Toyota offers no less than three dedicated performance cars – the GR86, the GR Supra, and the GR Corolla – all of which carry starting MSRPs below the average price of a new vehicle. And much of this rekindled interest in accessible performance can be credited to former company president and CEO, Akio Toyoda. 

Where Did Gazoo Racing Come FRom In The First Place?

The grandson of Toyota Motor Company founder Kiichiro Toyoda, Akio is an avid fan of motorsports and a legitimate hot shoe in his own right. Back in 2007, Akio competed in the 24 Hours Nürburgring endurance race with other Toyota team drivers using the pseudonym “Morizo Kinoshita.” Prohibited from using “Toyota” in the name of their team, which Akio himself likened to an enthusiast effort, the outfit was dubbed Gazoo Racing. 

In the time since, Gazoo Racing has evolved into an arm of the automaker that operates much like Mercedes-Benz’s AMG or BMW’s M Division. Along with its involvement in racing series ranging from the FIA World Endurance Championship to WRC and F1, Gazoo Racing has also taken on a more prominent role in the development of Toyota’s road-going performance vehicles, the latest evidence of which comes in the form of the 2025 GR Corolla. 

The details Of The 2025 Toyota GR Corolla

Although it’s only been on sale for a few years, Toyota is bringing a number of updates to its rowdy hot hatch for 2025. The changes are almost exclusively performance related and include everything from increased torque (now 295 lb-ft, up from 273) and suspension tweaks that are designed to improve cornering stability, to a new optional sub-radiator that’s designed to enable its 300hp 1.6-liter turbocharged three-cylinder mill to stay cool during longer track sessions. Also on the menu for 2025 is Toyota’s eight-speed Direct Automatic Transmission, a newly-developed unit that’s now offered alongside the standard six-speed manual gearbox.  

Toyota brought us out to Charlotte Motor Speedway to put the revised car to the test, and after a day spent caning it on facility’s “Roval” road course, we came away impressed with GR Corolla’s improved manners at speed as well as the quick-shifting automatic, latter of which is undoubtedly the quicker way to get around the circuit. But before putting us back on a plane, the automaker also invited us to come check out the GR Garage. 

Located in nearby Mooresville, NC, the GR Garage is one of three Toyota Racing Development facilities in North America. While TRD’s headquarters are in Costa Mesa, California, and chassis development is done at their Salisbury, North Carolina location, the GR Garage has been set up to prepare race cars as well as the athletes that drive them. 

The lower floor of the former textile shop has been outfitted with lifts and dedicated workstations to prep vehicles for the GR Cup, Toyota’s one-make road racing series. GR86s are sent to the GR Garage in essentially showroom-stock form and then taken down to their bare shells before being rebuilt to spec, a process that includes swapping the factory manual gearbox out for a six-speed sequential unit, tossing the factory brakes in favor an Alcon setup, and installing a Joe Gibbs Racing-supplied roll cage as well as a Bosch engine management system, along with numerous other modifications. But as cool as the race shop is, the really interesting stuff takes place upstairs. 

Gazoo Racing’s Recipe To Build A Racing Driver

“[GR Cup program manager] Mike Norem likes to say that we build cars on the lower floor and athletes on the upper floor,” Nelson Cosgrove, Executive Engineer for TRD, explained while introducing us to the facility. That might sound like just a clever marketing line, but after seeing how things operate upstairs, it’s clear that Gazoo Racing is taking a very scientific approach to driver development.

Our first stop upstairs was the GR Garage’s gym. While there are expansive weight racks, a basketball hoop, and other expected training equipment here, it was the “heat lab” that caught our attention. In this enclosed area, athlete’s heart rates are closely monitored while they exercise on stationary bikes and other cardio-focused machines. Although strength and body composition are important in the context of racing, heat tolerance is a major concern. As fatigue sets in, laps get slower and drivers are more likely to make mistakes. And if you’re wearing a full fire suit inside of a hot race car, that can happen very quickly. A large wall-mounted display provides real time information about how the athletes bodies are handling things. “The goal is to ensure that their bodies don’t spend to much time in the upper areas of the maximum recommended heart rate range, based on their age,” a GR Garage team member told us. “When you lose blood flow to your cerebral cortex, it affects your ability to make analytical decisions, which is really problematic when you’re in the middle of a race.” 

Nutrition plays an intrinsic role in this type of training as well, so an on-site dietician works one-on-one with drivers to establish meal plans that are often tailored to a specific day’s events. “Nutrition is just as important as the physical training,” says GR Garage’s Stephanie Hernandez. “And in order to provide the nutrition that these athletes need, we have to understand their physiological demands from day to day to help maximize their performance at the track on race day. Some of the data points that we use to establish that are sweat rate and sweat composition, and we use Metabolic Efficiency Tests to determine the number of calories and macronutrients that an athlete should be taking in.” Hernandez added that drivers can burn upwards of 6000 calories on a race day. “All of this information is used to help develop programs that are tailored to their individual needs.”

Another room on the upper floor is set up like a studio, replete with the sorts of cameras and lighting rigs that the drivers will face during interviews. “With all of our partners comes a lot of media obligations for our drivers,” another GR Garage member noted. “We also have announcements as well as one-off campaigns that our partners might want to do, so we wanted to create a ‘safe space’ for our drivers to train on this aspect of their racing career as well. A lot of our drivers are 16, 17, 18 years old, and this gives them a controlled space to practice doing interviews.” 

Back on the ground floor, team members showed us the various stations that are used to get the GR86s into race-ready form before taking the wraps off of the new GR Corolla TC racecar. 

Poised to compete in the 2025 season in a newly-established class that will combine SRO America’s TC and TCX classes, the GR Corolla TC bridges the gap between the entry-level GR86 Cup car and the GR Supra GT4 that competes in the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge and other GT4-based race classes in series around the world, providing would-be drivers with a clearer path to move their way up the ranks. 

Like the GR86 Cup car, the GR Corolla TC benefits from extensive race-specific modifications, but there is a notable omission: Instead of swapping out the factory transmission for a sequential ‘box, the GR Corolla TC will be outfitted with the same eight-speed that we tested at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the road-going production cars, further illustrating the increasingly symbiotic relationship between Toyota’s racing efforts and the cars you’ll see in the automaker’s showrooms. 

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