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Proof, if it were needed, that the heart of a true car enthusiast beats within Toyota's corporate carapace is coming to a gold-plated driveway near you soon...
Toyota has confirmed that you actually will be able to buy this Toyota Gazoo Racing Super Sports Concept. The Super Sports Concept is exactly what it looks like - a road-going version of Toyota's TS050 race car, the one that just blitzed the Le Mans 24hrs, becoming only the second ever Japanese car to win the French endurance classic. It uses the same 2.4-litre twin-turbo engine, packaged with a hybrid electric system that both provides power to, and draws energy from, all four wheels.
The official power output is 735kW, and for those still breaking out their slide rules, that's 1hp away from a round 1,000hp. Given the fact that its World Endurance Championship-derived chassis is made entirely of super-light carbon fibre, and therefore weighs sod all, we can safely assume that it will be staggeringly, viscously, appallingly, rapid.
Shigeki Tomoyama, President of Gazoo Racing Company, said that competing in the World Endurance Championship - one of the most demanding motorsports series - and racing at Le Mans had helped Toyota advance the development of its hybrid technology. "We started this project because we believe that creating a super sports car that delivers the same appeal as the TS050 Hybrid greatly adds to Toyota's involvement in WEC. And at some point in the near future, customers will have a chance to get behind the wheel of this incredible machine and experience its astonishing power and driving performance," said Tomoyama.
There's more at stake here than a mere small-run production of hypercars, though. The Gazoo Racing part of the name is the giveaway - Toyota has launched and sold out of the 200hp+ Yaris GRMN or Gazoo Racing Master of the Nurburgring hot hatch in Europe, the first Gazoo-branded car to the sold here. Clearly, the future plan involves building Gazoo up into Toyota's answer to Ford's RS, and Mercedes' AMG.
Certainly, that's according to Tomoyama, who said that the concept supercar is the start of Toyota's plan to develop road-going sports cars from its racing activities.
"Toyota Gazoo Racing aims to continue making exciting cars to bring smiles to our customers' faces and to contribute to the future of the automobile industry," he said. "Even as electrification and IT technologies accelerate, the availability of different types of cars, including polar opposite models like the GR Super Sport Concept and the e-Palette Concept [the oddball autonomous pod unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show], means that they will never become a commodity. If the e-Palette Concept is the next generation of the horse-drawn carriage, the GR Super Sport Concept would be the polar opposite as the next-generation racehorse. Its appeal is more personal, like that of a much-loved horse to its owner.
"Furthermore, it is an unchanging fact that people want to travel freely, access distant places, and to get there quicker than everyone else in attractive vehicles. The feelings that one has for a car that can do all this are rich and heart-pounding."
Probably the biggest reason of all for committing to production, though, is the potential to bring the car back to Le Mans as a racer. The World Endurance Championship announced over the Le Mans weekend that it's changing the regulations of the top-spec LMP1 class to allow car makers to shape their racers to look like their extreme road cars (Chiron, LaFerrari, AMG Project-1, Valkyrie etc) and doubtless Toyota has its eye on doing a Dauer 962 (look it up) and going back to the race in 2020 with a race-car turned road-car that's been turned back into a race-car.
"Rather than developing production cars into sports cars, we aim to work out how to incorporate the know-how developed through races and rallies into production cars," Tomoyama said. "Although it will be some time before you all have the opportunity to get behind the wheel, I hope that the GR Super Sport Concept will give you a taste of what we aim to achieve with our next-generation sports cars."