Future Classic: Toyota GR Yaris

The best ideas are timeless. Take the woolly hat for instance: it’s existed, largely unchanged in its basic design, since the 15th-century, and is just as effective at keeping your bonce warm today. Then there’s the vacuum flask, invented in the late 1800s and still produced to largely the same design, able to keep its contents cool, or hot, thanks to the simple physics of an insulating vacuum.

Coincidentally, both a woolly hat and a vacuum flask are two items ideal for watching the third idea that’s never really gone out of style: the four-wheel drive rally car. Ever since Audi pioneered the technology with the Quattro in the early 1980s, almost every World Rally Championship since (Lancia being the exception in 1983) has been won by a four-wheel drive car.

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Homologation, another fantastic and enduring idea, ensured that during this period and the 1990s in particular every great rally car had a great road car to go with it, and it provided us with a golden era of performance cars, as the Lancia Delta Integrale, Ford Escort RS Cosworth, Subaru Impreza Turbo, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and Toyota Celica GT-Four (among others) all hit the streets to ensure their roll-caged counterparts could hit the stages.

And then, in the late 1990s, the FIA introduced World Rally Car regulations, no longer requiring as much relationship between road and stage, and the supply of these great cars effectively dried up. Subaru and Mitsubishi went on producing turbocharged, four-wheel drive saloons for a while, but without the crucial rallying link to improve them, and without the cool-factor of seeing your daily driver going sideways through a forest in the hands of the pros, their popularity dwindled.

It didn’t help either that brands such as Volkswagen and Audi began producing hotted-up hatchbacks, often with all-wheel drive, that displaced the more rough-and-ready homologation-style cars in the market; the driving experience might not have been as raw, but a Golf R was a lot easier to live with, and arguably a lot less nerdy than a Subaru WRX, with its naff interior and a spoiler big enough to bridge the Thames.

So a great idea basically died out – that is, until Toyota brought it right back in late 2020, when it introduced the GR Yaris.

Here, finally, was a genuine homologation special once more, created to fit WRC homologation rules. Toyota went to the effort of creating a unique three-door body, with CFRP elements, extensive use of aluminium, as well as unique suspension not used in other Yaris models, and a whole new 1.6-litre three-cylinder turbocharged engine and four-wheel drive system.

And then, thanks to… well, other world events in 2020, the FIA changed its mind and basically made Toyota’s effort redundant. In another timeline it could all have ended there, but we’re hugely thankful that Toyota persisted, launched the GR Yaris, and later had it homologated for the Rally1 and Rally2 classes, because it’s become one of the performance car highlights of the last five years, and Toyota has created a true future classic in the process.

It’s essentially a revival of what we loved in those Imprezas and Evos in the 1990s: a car that can be used every day but is designed and built to the rigorous standards required for one of the toughest motorsports on the planet. Get into a GR Yaris and it has that curious feeling you used to get in a lot of old Japanese sports cars and hot hatches: at once a bit flaky and lightweight, with dash plastics and a door shut sound that wouldn’t impress a German engineer, but a feeling of great mechanical integrity, and a sense that everything will still be working well into the future.

In the Yaris that feeling is heightened because the three-door shell feels immensely tough and twist-resistant, almost like it doesn’t need a roll cage. That allows the suspension to do its work, and like those old Scoobies, there’s actually a little more body movement and pliancy than you’d expect, so B-roads don’t beat you up. Instead you beat them up, because the Yaris extracts remarkable grip from the surface, even when the weather’s lousy. Drive a GR Yaris and you’ll almost be willing it to rain, or even snow.

It’s of course rampantly fast, with 257bhp and later 300bhp from that compact 1.6-litre engine, and those later, more powerful cars also feel a little more serious – especially inside, where they get a no-nonsense, brutalist square of a dashboard that feels a little like the hastily-assembled interiors you used to get in the road versions of Group B cars (though being a Toyota, much better built).

But it’s the ease at which you can deploy this speed, in all weathers, which makes the GR Yaris special, just as it did those nineties’ homologation specials. We’ve had it for years in the interim of course with the Golf Rs, Audi S3s and Mercedes-AMG A-classes, but only the Toyota exists because of motorsport, which to us is much, much cooler.

So cool, in fact, that we wouldn’t think any less of you for keeping a woolly hat and a Thermos in the glovebox at all times. Never have three timeless ideas gone together so well.