Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division, previously a motorsports-focused branch of the company, is pivoting to include high-performance production cars under its new Toyota sub-brand, GR. There are several projects already in the works, including the much anticipated Toyota Supra sports car being developed in conjunction with BMW and a new Lexus GS F sports sedan. We spoke with Shigeki Tomoyama, president of Gazoo Racing, at the Tokyo auto show to hear more about Gazoo’s plans for the near future.
So far, GR’s main foray into the non-racing world is the Toyota Yaris GRMN, a homologation version of the Yaris hatchback that is tied in with Toyota’s World Rally Championship (WRC) efforts. It’s a limited-run vehicle that is only being sold in Japan and Europe, and Tomoyama has ruled it out for the United States, saying that the 209-hp supercharged hatch is too small to have any sort of broad appeal in the American sport-compact market. Supra Specifics

Instead, the first fruit of GR’s labor that we’re likely to see in the U.S. is the new Toyota Supra, due to be revealed sometime next year. The return of this revered sports-car nameplate has been in the news for years now, ever since Toyota entered into a partnership to develop a rear-wheel-drive sports-car platform with BMW. The Germans are further along in the process, having already shown a near-production concept version of the next-generation Z4 convertible. But the Supra, on which we&...