WRC
How Toyota's 2027 WRC challenger is taking shape
In motorsport, they say that if you stand still, you move backwards.
Nobody can accuse Toyota Gazoo Racing of doing that in 2026. While the marque is closing in on a historic, record-equalling 10th FIA World Rally Championship manufacturers’ crown, a huge effort is also under way behind the scenes to develop its all-new WRC challenger for 2027.
That project has now reached a crucial stage. Toyota has completed the third evolution of its new car, which technical director Tom Fowler says represents the final specification the team intends to homologate with the FIA.
It comes with a little over four months remaining until the championship’s new era begins at Rallye Monte-Carlo.
The current Rally1 cars will be replaced next season by the new WRC27 formula, which will form the cornerstone of the championship for the next decade. Cars will be built to a €345,000 cost cap and feature a tubular safety cell and double-wishbone suspension, with several technical elements derived from Rally2 regulations and performance targeted around the existing Rally2 benchmark.
Toyota finds itself in a unique position as the only manufacturer currently competing at the WRC’s top level known to be developing an all-new WRC27 car. Images of prototypes featuring varying body shapes have emerged online in recent months, although Toyota is yet to reveal which model its new challenger will represent.
Final-specification car ready for homologation
Toyota’s development programme began before the 2027 regulations had been fully finalised, forcing its engineers to initially work from their interpretation of where the rules were heading.
“From our development point of view, we started at the beginning of this year with a car testing which wasn't fully based on the 2027 regulations because they weren't fully written yet,” Fowler explained.
Fowler (L) with Sami Pajari
© Toyota
“We made a kind of guess about how to put a Rally2-based powertrain into a spaceframe chassis, because we knew that this was the basis of the regulation, but we didn't know the details of exactly how the chassis should finally be made, so we started with our first test car.
“During the beginning of the year, the FIA regulations became more final, and we started to receive specifically how the chassis regulation should be, and we converted our design into one which was compliant with all these FIA changes.
“Around April, we converted our design over to the FIA-compliant chassis and produced a second test car, which started to drive in the springtime. That was as close as possible to the final car that we would homologate.
“But, of course, during the next two to three months of development we found quite a lot of topics where, from our side, we wanted to improve.
“So where we are now is that we have just produced the third car, which is the final evolution of the car and is in the full homologation specification that we intend to do the paperwork on with the FIA.”
More than 5,000km of testing
Toyota has already completed more than 5,000km of testing with its new challenger, including extensive running on asphalt and gravel.
Much of that work has been carried out by 2019 world champion Ott Tänak, who returned to Toyota this year in a test and development role. The team’s current Rally1 drivers have also sampled the car and are set to increase their involvement over the coming weeks and months.
“Our Rally1 drivers have been in the car recently, but I think Ott has done a bit more than them so far because he has a bit more time on his hands,” Fowler added.
“But I think we're going to see in the next months that that's going to change. Up until now, all of our Rally1 drivers have been focusing very clearly on the goal of becoming world champion this season, and they're still focused on that.
“But now, with not so much time left until Monte-Carlo 2027, they're all starting to think about next season. For sure, they're going to be keen to be in the car more.
“I think the most important thing is to make all of our drivers satisfied, so whoever is going to be driving our car next year, they need to work with us to get the car that they need.
“I think we’ve seen in this service park that if you develop the car for one driver, then it doesn’t make a good team solution. So I would say we need to make them all happy.”
Toyota's GR Yaris Rally2
© WRC
Rally2 provides Toyota's benchmark
Developing Toyota's WRC27 challenger comes with a challenge that previous generations of top-level WRC machinery did not face: the team already knows roughly how fast it needs to be.
With the well-developed GR Yaris Rally2 already in its stable, Toyota has conducted back-to-back testing between the two cars to ensure its new challenger can hit the ground running in 2027.
“This is one of the most challenging and number one topics of this development programme,” Fowler said.
“Normally, for WRC development and for Rally1 development, everyone goes away with a regulation book and scrambles to do the fastest possible car based on this book. You have no idea what everyone else is doing, and then everyone turns up at Monte-Carlo with a completely new car to completely new regulations. You find out who's done the best job.
“The 2027 regulations are a bit different because the regulation from the beginning was always written in a way that it's equivalent to Rally2. So, in a way, you already know what your competition is because you need to be faster than a Rally2 car.
“Our development target has always been to understand from the very first drawings and the very first concepts that we have to work in a way that we are competitive against Rally2, and so we have benchmarked against our own car on a number of occasions.
“We've been working on this [Rally2] car across all the different rallies for a couple of seasons now, so the car is in a good place. To go out with a brand-new car with the same engine, the same transmission regulations and a different chassis, it's not straightforward to be immediately faster.
“It takes some work, but our target is to beat our own car, and that's our benchmark.”
Toyota is yet to confirm how many WRC27 cars it plans to field at next year’s Rallye Monte-Carlo season opener, although the manufacturer has already received interest from customer teams looking to purchase its new challenger.
